by Anne Summers
‘I’ve been knackered,’ he used to say.
Whether it was the cancer, or losing his manhood, but the fight went out of him. He suddenly became old and I was shocked to see how frail he was. He was just a couple of years older than I am today, yet he seemed elderly. It was awful to watch the power ebbing out of him. It was something that I had observed with almost ghoulish pleasure in once-powerful politicians or businessmen: men who had once used their power in brutish fashion and who were now old and weak and vulnerable and who embodied the fact that power accrues to the position—not the person. Once they were no longer Prime Minister, or Secretary of Defence, or chairman of BHP or whatever powerful position they had once held, these men changed. Sometimes they became bitter and angry about their diminished authority, but often they were transformed into kindly and likeable people who were unrecognisable from their previous selves. Why wasn’t it possible for them to be this way when they still had power? Why is our notion of power associated with meanness, even cruelty? Why is so much masculine ego invested in the idea of palpable power? You see it in so many ways: the father who must hold sway over his children, the husband who must dominate his wife, sometimes using violence to assert his control. It is a model of authority that damages us all, men themselves as well as the women who suffer the effects, that is the basis of war and other forms of violence, and it was something, we were to discover, that lurked powerfully in our family. A man who is a kind and considerate leader is often denigrated as weak or ineffectual. A women leader who tries to subvert the model, well we know what happens to her. Even though I felt this way, about the system and many of the individual men who epitomised it, I was nevertheless overcome with sadness to watch my father’s diminishment.
The trip was difficult. My father could not walk easily, nor could he hear well, so conversation was hard. He needed to urinate frequently and it was not easy finding public restrooms in New York. ‘Freud made the same complaint,’ I assured him. We frequently had to stop at a bar and order three Cokes just so that my father could relieve himself. But he and my mother had managed to enjoy their first visit to the Big Apple. They surprised even themselves by catching the subway and meeting me at our appointed destination. We’d done the touristy things like the over-sized sandwiches at the Stage Deli, and visited the top of the World Trade Center, but my father’s favourite moment had been a performance of Madame Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera. He’d become quite emotional at being in such a famous place, hearing one of the operas he loved most. We had cheap seats but it was still a magical experience, watching the crystal chandeliers being drawn-up before the curtain rose.
On 17 October my parents attended Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, to mark the tenth anniversary of Jamie’s death. When they returned to my apartment, my mother kept making references to Jamie but I found that I was unable to respond. I was scared of where the conversation might lead. If we talked about Jamie and his death, we would need to acknowledge what was happening to my father, and if we did that, I knew I would have to confront the resentment and anger that I still harboured towards him. Although on the surface things between us might have seemed normal, in reality they were not. I was unable to forget, or forgive, the brutal hostility he’d shown towards me year after year when I was a teenager, nor the torrid scene on my wedding day in 1967, when he’d called me a ‘whore’ in front of my friends. Although, I told myself, it was all a long time ago, it still hurt. So we did not talk about his illness or his prognosis. We did not talk about what would happen if he became very ill or started to die. As I watched him struggle to stand and to walk, and saw his face reveal how sick he was, I realised that he did not have long to live. Yet we found ourselves incapable of expressing our fears, we were unable to offer him any consolation, and we certainly were unable to put into words how we felt about each other. We had always been this way and we had not changed. All I could do was hug him and offer platitudes that I was not sure that I really meant. I realised that my resentments ran deep, and while I now felt sorry for him and was scared about what lay ahead, I had not been able to find it in myself to start the conversation we needed to have. But then at JFK Airport as I said goodbye, my mother began to weep and then my father totally collapsed into terrible tears, and it became clear that he thought that he would never see me again. Four months later, I got the call I was dreading. The cancer had spread throughout his body, my mother told me over the crackling phone-line. It was now just a matter of time.
Being a foreign correspondent in New York was a much harder job than I had supposed it would be. I got very little direction from my editors—when I could speak to them. Communications were still amazingly primitive—it could sometimes take up to six hours to get a phone circuit via the international operator—and the top editors were either not there or too busy to talk. We correspondents were pretty much on our own. Malcolm Maiden had come to New York to cover business—including Wall Street—for the Financial Review, which was a big relief for me as he was far better qualified to cover the story and I was back in my comfort zone, writing about politics which meant I travelled frequently to Washington DC. I had a White House press pass and could attend press briefings. The Secret Service had evidently not checked the address I’d given on my application, which was just as well because I did not live there, but security was not much of an issue in those days. Without further introductions from an Australian Prime Minister, I was never again able to secure interviews with people of the calibre of Volcker and Weinberger. In fact, it was almost impossible to talk to anyone from the administration in Washington. Coming from a small and reliable ally certainly had its disadvantages when it came to getting stories. Sometimes I even had difficulty getting the State Department desk officer on the phone. When I looked back over my first year in the US, I had managed a few decent interviews and had broken a few small stories, but I had not been able to develop my writing as I’d hoped this foreign posting would allow. I had been unable to find a way to write about America and Americans in the way that I had planned when I’d first arrived. More and more, I had to settle for covering Australians. Which is not to say it wasn’t fun to be writing about Midnight Oil, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra or Circus Oz, or to be keeping an eye on what Australian businessmen were up to. Rupert Murdoch, who was expanding his US businesses, was usually good for a story but it was not what I had set out to do. I was always on the lookout for ways to write what I’d seen as my prime objective: understanding America. But it was not easy. To most Americans, Australia was either exotic or inconsequential. Everyone wanted to go there, they said, although their first preference usually was New Zealand, which had done a much better job marketing itself to Americans than we had. In the 1970s when I’d been in the Midwest, people politely told me they’d read or seen the movie The Thornbirds. In 1987 the point of reference was another movie, one that in the US was marketed as ‘Crocodile’ Dundee, the quote marks to indicate it wasn’t a swamp movie. It wasn’t much of a connection, and it certainly was not much of a lure when I put in interview requests. This meant I could not even just report, as there was simply no way to be able to meet a wide-enough range of Americans. Perhaps being located in New York made it even more difficult. I was nothing but a fringe-dweller. Observing only from the periphery, neither a native nor an immigrant. Not knowing the place the way people who were born there; and not striving for a stake, and being willing to set aside criticisms, as immigrants had to do. I simply did not belong.
After two years in New York I could no longer hide my frustrations. I loved the city but not my job, and my personal life was miserable. My several longstanding American friends tended to travel a lot. Paula Weideger had fallen in love with Henri Lessore, an Englishman, and she now spent a lot of time in London. Margot Fox, who I’d met through my ex-husband John Summers, was also on the road constantly in her job as French interpreter for the State Department. When she was in town she was always a lot of fun and, more than once, treate
d us to the fringe benefits of the job. One remarkable night she took me and a couple of friends to the Blue Note, where Dizzie Gillespie was playing. She had just escorted him on a tour of francophone Africa and he showed his appreciation by getting us good seats and sitting with us after his performance. He asked me for a cigarette. Smoking was forbidden, of course. He did not care and no one was going to stop him, but I did not dare light up. Mostly I hung out with other Australians, those like me who were working temporarily in New York, and my old friends David Hay, Phillip Frazer and Elisabeth Wynhausen, who had moved to the US, perhaps permanently. Elisabeth and I spent a lot of time together, including the day in early November when we’d used our press passes to get to the finishing line of the New York Marathon in Central Park. We’d given Robert de Castella a big, raucous Aussie cheer. He’d been injured and was struggling but he gave us a grateful grin and, we told ourselves, we’d helped him get over the line—in second place. And there was the never-ending stream of Aussie visitors, some of them family or friends who I was pleased to see, others I scarcely knew but who thought they could avail themselves of my services as a tour guide of the Big Apple. I soon learned to rebuff such people. I’d had a few flings and one-night stands with people passing through but nothing serious, and I’d had no luck in hooking-up with any locals. I’d even placed an advertisement in the New York Review of Books, the literary publication where people placed personal classified ads searching for soul mates: ‘SWF seeks 40-something SWM to share movies, wine, conversations and long walks in the park’—that kind of thing. I can’t remember what I said in my ad, but I’d been quite excited when an English professor from Boston responded. We agreed to meet outside a kiosk in the Village. I wore one of my new Bruno Magli high heels, which was a mistake. He barely came up to my waist and he was wearing a brown suit. My ad should have said: ‘SWF seeks SWM with some fashion sense.’ We could find nothing to talk about. My one-and-only date with an American man lasted less than an hour.
In April 1987 Rupert Murdoch established a fourth television network in the US. He had ignored the conventional wisdom that it could not be done, and on 6 April launched the Fox Network with a prime-time debut of Married—with Children, a program I described in my piece as ‘a smutty sitcom’.4 It was an instant hit. With its down-market program formula and its aggressively right-wing political agenda promulgated on its Fox News channel that was established a decade later in 1996, Fox grew to become an influential and profitable network, while in the second decade of the 21st century the legacy networks struggled to survive. Just a week before the Fox launch, Murdoch had spent $US300 million to acquire Harper & Row, the third-largest book publisher in the United States, a move which, I wrote, ‘further consolidates his worldwide dominance over newspaper, magazine and book publishing’.5 I had also had some fun in August 1986 with a little scoop about Murdoch gazumping Ronald Reagan by spending $7 million on a fourteen-room, two-storey Spanish style mansion in Bel Air once rented by Katharine Hepburn. President Reagan thought he had finalised the purchase of his dream retirement home with its spectacular views and its Hollywood history, I wrote, but that was before the media mogul came along and, doing what happens all the time in Sydney, made a better offer.6 I’d got the tip for this story from David Hay, who was now living in LA trying to break into screen-writing, and he had seen a small item in the Hollywood Reporter. I stayed with David in his apartment in West Hollywood and had been a witness to a tragedy unfolding right next door, where a friend of his was succumbing to AIDS. A stream of friends came and went, knowing there was nothing they could yet do to stop this calamitous and fatal plague that had assailed the gay community just a few years earlier. I had been visiting New York in 1981 when David told me about the meeting he’d attended, convened by a doctor in the East Village, of men worried about this as-yet unnamed new disease that was striking gay men. Now, just five years later, AIDS had become an epidemic that had already killed almost 49,000 gay men, haemophiliacs and intravenous drug users in the United States. There was widespread panic, but also political revulsion. The Reagan White House refused to acknowledge what was happening. As the medical profession struggled to understand the disease and its origins, the gay community became radicalised and militant. People were fighting for their lives. It would become one of the biggest stories of the 1980s.
I continued to file stories big and small, including the occasional gems, stories that just made you smile. In late October 1986 I filed a story about Malcolm Fraser losing his trousers in a motel in Memphis.7 Fraser had been visiting the southern city in his role as co-Chair of the Commonwealth’s Eminent Persons Group, a body established to negotiate an end to apartheid, and had failed to turn up for a businessmen’s breakfast. The editor of the local newspaper had asked one of his reporters to investigate and soon the story emerged: Fraser had checked into a sleazy motel, paying cash and giving a false name, and had emerged hours later having been robbed of his passport, credit cards, cash—and his trousers. He had had to borrow some pants from the bellhop, a much shorter man than the former Prime Minister. Later, all kinds of embellishments emerged about who Fraser had been with but the initial story merely centred on the embarrassing outcome of his escapade. I felt a small surge of happiness when I filed the story, as I remembered what a bastard Fraser had been while in office. I was astonished by the way he became a hero of the left in his later years. He was idolised for his liberal stance on asylum-seekers, and cheered when he and his wife Tamie resigned from the Liberal Party. But my story glory was short-lived. I discovered the next morning that Paul Sheehan, sitting in the office next-door to me, also had the story. He and I did not get on, and certainly did not share with each other what we were writing about. Unlike me, Sheehan had been able to track down Fraser and get a quote, and the Sydney Morning Herald had given his story major treatment, whereas my piece had been run as just a little right-hand column on the front page.
I had hoped my three-part series on Argentina would be my journalistic salvation. I’d done an enormous amount of preparatory research and during my week in Buenos Aires had had great access, including an interview with President Raúl Alfonsin. It was just three years since democracy had returned to this damaged country, after seven years of the so-called ‘dirty war’ of military rule. During that time as many as 30,000 people had ‘disappeared’. It had been chilling while I was there to see that the ubiquitous olive green Ford Falcons the military had used to abduct activists were still on the streets. It had been a hard subject to write about, and I felt my series had not done it justice. Fly-in fly-out journalism was not the way to understand a country, I realised, especially one that had endured the kind of trauma that had taken place in Argentina. What I had done was workmanlike, but it was not the kind of journalism I aspired to. It was not the penetrating or elegant writing that I aspired to. I started to doubt myself, to think that perhaps I didn’t have it in me. Or perhaps newspapers were not the place for that sort of writing. I was becoming attracted to American magazines and the license they seemed to give writers to explore important topics. Maybe I should be looking for another kind of job.
I’d visited Australia in May and gone to Canberra to catch up with people, and was astonished when Mike Codd, now head of Prime Minister and Cabinet, asked if I’d be interested in coming back to the bureaucracy. I thought I’d burnt that bridge but he told me I’d have no trouble getting a Deputy Secretary’s job. I’d also had a very strong overture from Hawke’s office that there could be a job there, if I wanted it. I could not see myself going back to Canberra, but it was nice to know that I was seen as having the ability to do such jobs. I’d made the leap back to journalism and that was where I was going to stay, but maybe not where I was at the moment. I met with Suich who asked me what I wanted to do.
‘Edit the Sydney Morning Herald,’ I said without hesitation. The National Times would have been the place for me to learn and I would have left New York in a heartbeat if that job had been offered to me.
It was too late, of course. Valerie Lawson had been made editor of the Times on Sunday, as it was now called, a month earlier. She asked me to be her deputy. I was insulted enough that I had not been considered for the top job, and I knew she’d shopped the deputy’s role to at least one other person, so I said a resounding No. I’d had a senior man in Fairfax beg me to take it. I’d be much better with staff, he said, and with ideas. But I was hurt and angry that yet again I had been passed over for the editor’s job. There had been six editors in the nine years since Evan Whitton had succeeded Suich in 1978. I’d looked on with disbelief and some bitterness as David Marr, Brian Toohey, Jeff Penberthy, Robert Haupt and, now, Valerie Lawson had each been given the job. Why not me? I was as qualified as any of them. I did not have editing experience, Suich said when I complained. Neither had any of the other appointees. I was assured that I was being tracked towards something big. If I could just put in the hard slog in a number three or four slot at the Herald for the next five to seven years, it would all fall into place. It was hardly enticing. I went back to New York restless and uncertain about what I was going to do with my life.
In mid-1987, Sandra Yates arrived in New York from Sydney with a brief to start a new magazine for teenage girls. Sandra had been deputy managing director of Sungravure, the magazine publishing group owned by Fairfax, and publisher of, among many titles, Dolly, the very successful magazine for teenage girls. She had proposed that Dolly could be migrated to the US where, she argued, the existing teenage titles were staid and boring. The market could do with a big shake-up. It was a brave idea but Fairfax bought it, and now Sandra was in town looking for premises, getting herself known in the magazine publishing world, lining-up an advertising agency, and recruiting the staff she needed to launch this venture. I was enlisted to help look for office space, so for a couple of months I found myself working closely with her. Sandra was a very down-to-earth person who spoke bluntly and did not waste time with ceremony. She knew what she wanted and she went after it with a focus and determination that I watched with both admiration and amazement. She was creating a totally new product that, after some research, she decided was going to be called Sassy. The launch was planned for March the following year. Sandra’s enthusiasm was infectious, and what she was doing looked far more exciting and interesting than where I found myself. I wished I could somehow be part of it. So on 4 August 1987, when Sandra took me to lunch at Café Un Deux Trois, a bistro located at 123 West 44th Street, just around the corner from the Fairfax office, and told me that Ms. magazine was for sale and she thought that we should get Fairfax to buy it, she would run it in a stable with Sassy, and that I should become its editor-in-chief, I did not hesitate.
