Unfettered and Alive

by Anne Summers

  I flew back to Athens with Papandreou. We talked about the spread of feminist ideas, especially to the Third World. She described how during the years 1967–74, when the Western women’s movement was developing, Greek women were fighting the junta. Papandreou seemed very popular wherever we went, especially with women who were receptive to her efforts to promote women’s issues. The previous year her husband had legislated equal pay for women but, I was told, there was muttering about his wife ‘interfering’ in politics. Andreas dumped Margaret four years later for a younger woman, but he died in 1996 and did not live to see George, the first of his four children with Margaret, become Prime Minister of Greece in 2009.

  We knew none of this of course as we talked in November 1985. I looked past her through the plane’s window to the Aegean Sea beneath. That evening in Athens I had dinner with the young journalist from Ethos, the communist party newspaper who’d been on the Chios trip. She and her fiancé took me to a private yacht club down the coast. We spent the evening talking about money. I had never met such bourgeois communists. I was going to Paris next, for an OECD meeting. Somehow I knew that my life was about to change radically. Even more than my time in the US in 1978, this trip had opened my eyes to ideas, experiences and people I rarely encountered in my safe little world back in Australia. I was feeling impatient for something new, and more challenging.

  While in Paris I made contact with Jacqueline Nonon. She had established the first Women’s Bureau in the European Commission in the late 1960s. After working there for a decade she was approached by President Giscard d’Estaing to establish a women’s office for France. After just a few months, she resigned in a very public protest against the President’s failure to give the office adequate political and financial support. Now she was working at the Commission’s Information Office in Paris. She took me to a very special dinner held at the Hotel Royal Monceau on Avenue Hoche of Club ‘L’, an exclusive women’s network set up to rival the men’s Club de Siecle. It was a high-powered and ultra-glamorous affair. I met the president of a French bank, France’s Ambassador to UNESCO, the world’s only female 747 pilot who flew for Air France, and a number of journalists. I was disconcerted to discover midway through the sumptuous meal that I was the guest of honour and expected to speak. I was unprepared and in introducing me, Nonon told the audience all about my job at OSW, leaving me with nothing to talk about. After weeks on the road I was travel-worn, with no decent clothes and looked decidedly frumpish in the midst of this mink-coat wearing group. Worse, I spoke no French. After I sat down there was a polite smattering of applause, but I could tell that I had not made much of an impression. Then another international guest was invited to speak. She was from Texas and was definitely better turned out than I was. I consoled myself by thinking that at least she too would have the same language difficulty, but then shrank back embarrassed as she addressed the group in perfect French.

  Some of these women were avowed feminists. Others were there because they were working women who needed a counter to the male networks. Puck Simonet, who ran Club ‘L’, discussed with me the possibility of setting up a branch in Australia, but I could not imagine such a group. There was no comparison with the Girls’ Dinners of femocrats in Canberra. These were usually rowdy, inebriated, letting-off-steam affairs and no one could accuse the attendees of being stylish. If there was to be a Club ‘L’ in Australia, it would have to be in Sydney or Melbourne, for women in business. In fact such a group was setting itself up in Sydney at about this time. Led by publisher Barbara Cail and involving entrepreneurs Imelda Roche, Carla Zampatti, businesswoman Wendy McCarthy and others, Chief Executive Women was started in 1985 as an offshoot of another French group, Women Chiefs of Enterprise. It is now taken for granted there needs to be networking groups at all levels for women, and the work that in the 1980s was done only at the United Nations or the OECD is now also taken up by the World Economic Forum and other high-level business bodies. Not before time.

  During this trip, I received a very tempting job offer.

  If I’d thought journalism would be forever closed to me after working for the government, I was relieved to discover that I was wrong. Max Suich, now the chief editorial executive of Fairfax, who had been my first-ever editor at the National Times, had kept trying to entice me back almost from the day I left the Financial Review. Various jobs, mostly in Sydney, all of them in newspapers, were dangled in front of me. I knew the industry, the company and the people who ran it well enough to know that lures are not firm offers. Nor was I at all certain that I wanted to trade the influence, the high profile and engagement with such a range of issues that my current job gave me for a desk job in Sydney. For all the frustrations of being a femocrat, we could—and we did—actually change things. However hard-fought and compromised the final policy was, we could point to tangible improvement to childcare. OSW had become an economic policy force to be reckoned with in PM&C. We had pioneered the Women’s Budget Program, a policy tool that would be adopted internationally and is still used around the world today. We had entrenched anti-discrimination laws. We were about to legislate to require all large employers to report on the gender breakdown of their workforce. We had got the bureaucracy taking status of women into account when developing policy.

  Promotion in the newspaper game meant becoming an editor. That was a powerful and prestigious job within the industry, and of course top editors wielded considerable political power through their publications. But I could not get excited about a job with ‘journalists hours’, that would see me at the office till at least 10 o’clock every night. I was single. I was 41. I wanted a life. I did not see myself meeting my soul mate in the Fairfax offices in Sydney. Most of the men there about my age were already married. I was tired of affairs and of one-night stands.

  ‘I never hear any gossip about you,’ Peter Wilenski once said to me.

  I was relieved that I’d managed to fly under the radar with the very few flings I’d enjoyed in Canberra. Most of the time, though, I was sexually lonely and after seven years of living in the national capital, I knew I was unlikely to find what I wanted in that town. I hankered to move into different worlds, mix with people who weren’t in politics, who did not know—or care—what an IDC was.

  Max Suich was canny. He offered me the one job he knew I would not be able to resist: New York. I agonised about it nevertheless. I drew up lists of Pros and Cons: the lure of an exciting new opportunity versus having been at OSW for just three years, with some important business still unfinished. Someone gave me a poster of the great aviator Amelia Earhart with her famous words: If you are offered a great adventure, you don’t refuse it. It hadn’t ended well for her, but at least she had not died wondering and I was tired of the small and, ultimately, boring pond that was Canberra. The affirmative action laws were not yet through Parliament. Senator Walsh had defied the Prime Minister and denied funding to establish the agency that would administer the laws, and there was a risk the whole package might collapse. I should not leave while this was unresolved. But, I told myself, there is never a good time to leave. There is always unfinished business. And, a pragmatic little voice inside me said: quit while you are ahead. Before people turn on you.

  When I announced that I was leaving, to go to New York to become North American manager for my old newspaper employer Fairfax, many of my public service colleagues were astonished.

  ‘You’d give up a permanent job, with super, to go to a dangerous place like New York?’

  ‘I can’t wait,’ I’d said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘THE TIMES WILL SUIT ME’

  Finally, I was back in New York. This time I had a job and my own apartment, in a doorman building on the Upper West Side. I took the subway to work, joining the tightly packed throng on the narrow platform at the 72nd Street station. I rode the express 2 or 3 train the one stop to Times Square and spilling out of the carriage at 42nd Street, strode purposefully towards the filthy narrow steps that led up
to the chaos of people and traffic just above us in Times Square. Just like a real New Yorker, I told myself. Until I tried to order a black coffee at the deli near the office and was greeted with such hostility that I backed out of the place in bafflement. Later, someone explained that there was ‘coffee’, which was black, and there was ‘regular coffee’, which had milk. There would be many other such blunders before I could navigate the town with some ease, but I would always be a foreigner. My accent was a dead giveaway, so even after I’d learned most of the more obvious social cues, and although I began to feel more and more at home as the years rolled on, I realised I would never be able to find my way into the American imagination. That would remain as remote to me as any foreign nation’s. It was easy for we visitors to think we knew America because of our familiarity with its movies and television, its music and other cultural creations, but just because we thought we spoke the same language did not mean that we even began to comprehend this curious and infuriating country. The United States was a melting pot, no doubt about that, and New York was the most multicultural of cities where no one questioned your right to be there. If you had money or connections or a claim to fame you would be embraced, as I would discover, but you would never have the grace or certainty of a native. That did not mean you could not have a helluva time and from the moment I arrived at JFK Airport in March 1986, that is what I set out to do.

  I was now in the New York I’d always craved. Not the edgy downtown of my first visit, or the elegant Greenwich Village of my most recent trip. I was now in Gotham City, with its canyons and cacophony and in-your-face capitalism. This was the real New York and I was enchanted. I could not wait to devour it. I had been appointed North American manager of John Fairfax & Sons, responsible for supervising the small local staff and overseeing what was then quite a sizeable syndication business. The Fairfax office was on the 24th floor of 1500 Broadway, a 1970s glass skyscraper overlooking Times Square. It was right across from a New York architectural masterpiece, the 1927 Paramount Building, with its distinctive dome and clock face, and a lobby modelled on the Paris Opera House, where a lot of entertainment companies were located. We were right in the middle of the Broadway theatre district, known as the Great White Way. The distinctive neon lights that lit up the fronts of many buildings were neither as ubiquitous nor as garish as they became after the transformation of Times Square following Mayor Rudolph Guiliani’s famous ‘cleanup’ of the area in the mid-1990s but even then they were the brightest lights of the biggest city. From my window I could look down on the famous news ticker running round the triangular-shaped white tile-clad building that was like a miniature version of the famous Flatiron Building, almost twenty blocks further south. Four blocks away to the north on West 47th street was the famous diamond district where I saw Hasidic Jews for the first time: men dressed all in black—hats, coats, gloves, with long, usually grey, beards—carrying attaché cases and seemingly bent slightly, as if against the wind. Four blocks south was the garment district where racks of clothes were in constant movement from factory to delivery, and where a sharp-eyed observer might spot a celebrity designer, a famous model or, best of all, one of the most powerful figures in New York: a fashion magazine editor.

  Each of the Fairfax newspapers had their own correspondent who reported directly to their editors, so my responsibilities towards them were practically non-existent, but I was also North American editor for the Financial Review, writing news stories and a regular column as well as a weekly piece for the Natty Times, which had been renamed Times on Sunday. After a gap of three years, I hoped I could easily move back into writing. Not that I had any choice as I seemed to have burned my bridges. I had gone to Washington in April for Bob Hawke’s visit, and found that the bureaucrats who had been my colleagues just a few months earlier would not talk to me. But nor could I find much common ground with the Press Gallery; I could no longer fall in with their perpetual cynicism. I had views, and values, and no longer wanted to conceal these. I realised, yet again, that I was on my own, no longer part of any herd, but I did not care. I was all fired up. The New York Times was just half a block away, on West 43rd Street, and although I did not yet know anyone there, I felt inspired by its mere propinquity.

  I already knew that there were many Americas. I would never experience ‘the awful realization’ of F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1932, when he climbed to the top of the recently completed Empire State Building and took in the view and saw that New York ‘was a city after all and not a universe’.1 He saw beyond the canyons of skyscrapers to the towns and the fields and rivers beyond ‘the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination’. The Jazz Age was over, the Wall Street crash had shattered the lives of millions, and the country was settling into a long Depression. But the man who had said there were no second acts in Americans’ lives, now saw that also was untrue. Instead, ‘from the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building’, the place of his epiphany, and evidence that America would never stop inventing itself, would never cease to amaze.

  I had seen so much of this perplexing country during my previous visits, and met such a bewildering array of Americans, that I could never be tempted to easy generalisations about this place or its people. I wanted to find a way to write about America that would be engaging and informative and, above all, would not rely on the Yank-bashing stereotypes that Australians responded to so well. It was easy to make fun of America. I decided I would try to do something different. I was in the right place and, it seemed to me, the right time as the Reagan era wound down. I would be an eager observer as America repudiated the harshness of those free-wheeling, free-market years of monetarism and deregulation and moved back, politically, to what I hoped was a replica of its truer self, the country that had been able, through the sixteen years of the leadership of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to keep its people’s spirits alive during the hard years of Depression and war. Australia had turned its back on Malcolm Fraser after eight years of punitive conservative politics and embraced the fairer, more inclusive policies of Labor led by Bob Hawke. I hoped America was ready to do the same and here I was, on the ground, ready to tell the story. If that indeed was the story; the powers-that-be back in Sydney seemed to have other ideas.

  ‘The story,’ Max Suich had told me excitedly as he pursued me to leave government and come back to Fairfax, this time in New York, ‘the story in America is the capital markets.’ Suich was now Fairfax’s editorial director but he’d been a reporter before he’d become editor of the National Times and for him, ‘the story’ was the political or, to his mind more likely, the economic circumstances that defined that particular moment in the history of the place you were writing about. When he had represented the Financial Review in Tokyo in the late 1960s, ‘the story’ had been the iron ore negotiations between Japan and Australia. He’d covered the ongoing setting of prices and the determining of supplies that would define the trade relations between the two nations for decades to come, and which would cement Australia’s national wealth as being dependent on resources. Suich also covered the men who made this story, the miners such as Russell Madigan and Lang Hancock who had had the foresight to develop the ore and to seek out Japan, so recently our mortal wartime enemy, as a natural trading partner. Now, in New York, ‘the story’ was how the wide-scale deregulation, including of the financial markets, and the infatuation with monetary policy, was changing not just the broader US economy but the very way Wall Street operated. Bonds were now sexier than stocks and a new product—the junk bond—would soon emerge as one of the definitive errors of the era. Debt was king and leverage was the new way to easy wealth. Leveraged buyouts, or LBOs, as they were known, were the new way to buy and sell companies; debt was deployed against a company’s cash flow and assets, which were then broken up and sold to repay the debt. The average return on LBOs in 1986 was 40 per cent, according to Euromoney magazine. A 31-year-old computer nerd by the name of Bill Gates had just floated his s
oftware company, Microsoft Corp, on the stock exchange, earning himself an instant $350 million and then, sitting back, had watched the stock soar. The stock market was on a dizzying upward spiral. Money was the new god. Greed was good. The savings and loans crisis was starting to reveal itself. Where would it all end?

  It was, as journalists say, quite a story. I could see that. I just wasn’t sure that it was the story that I wanted to be my main focus. I felt desperately unequipped, for one thing. Suich had arranged for me to be briefed by money market experts and foreign exchange dealers before I’d left Australia, but I had no natural feel for finance and economics. Although I had written for the Financial Review for five years before joining OSW, my subject had been politics, which I understood and enjoyed. A few years later, in 1989, when I read Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis, an eye-poppingly revealing insider account of the operations of a Wall Street investment banking firm in the late 1980s, I understood how compelling a story it was. By then, of course, the stock market had crashed, the junk bonds and savings and loan scandals had bankrupted thousands of small institutions and provided a grim foretaste of what was to come with the housing collapse that led to the global financial crisis in 2008. But Lewis’s books (he wrote several, all of them gripping) and others such as The Barbarians at the Gate had the benefit of being retrospective accounts. Although I could see the bigger picture of the dangers in what was happening, I had trouble understanding the story as it was unfolding. When I wrote about the economy or the financial system, I was more likely to approach these subjects the way I would a political story: look for the major issues and trends, identify the key players, and try to tell the story of what they were doing. I had no technical grasp, as was very clear when during an interview with Paul Volcker in late June 1986 I’d asked him a question about monetary policy.