Unfettered and Alive

by Anne Summers

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘REAL FEMINISTS WITH REAL MONEY’

  ‘We’ve never met but I feel I already know you,’ Gloria Steinem flashed her celebrated mega-wattage smile and warmly locked eyes with me. ‘After all, we are both members of the revolutionary women’s government-in-exile.’

  It was mid-August 1987 and we were in the Park Avenue offices of Henry Ansbacher Inc., an investment-banking firm that specialised in media deals. They had been looking for a buyer for Ms. magazine and Sandra Yates and I were there to meet Gloria and her long-time friend and business partner, Pat Carbine, to see if they would consider selling to John Fairfax & Sons, the Australian corporation that employed us. I found Gloria charming. She was extraordinarily attractive and looked amazingly youthful. I knew she was 53, eleven years older than me, but with her slim figure, long slender legs and shoulder-length blonde-streaked hair, she barely looked 40. But I thought her words were a strange way to greet someone who wanted to buy the magazine she had founded fifteen years earlier and had toiled through financial salt-mines to try to keep alive. Even meeting with us would seem to be an admission of defeat but, as we were soon to discover, she had no choice but to sell. Ms. magazine was on the verge of financial collapse.

  Just a few months earlier, l had written a front-page story for the Financial Review of Kerry Packer’s brief involvement with this famous icon of American feminism. I had reported the unusual fact that the Australian media mogul had been personally involved in negotiations over a small-beer deal for Cleo magazine, part of his magazine stable, to have rights to use material from Ms. It was a surprising marriage, the ultra-glossy and sexually frank commercial magazine pitched at young women (and which ran nude male centrefolds) and the iconic feminist magazine, with its rather stern tone and its embarrassingly low production values. What on earth would Cleo find reprintable from Ms.? Even more surprising was the fact that Kerry Packer, the proprietor, had joined Trevor Kennedy, the managing director of his company Australian Consolidated Press and Cleo editor Lisa Wilkinson at the table in New York for this deal. ‘Perhaps the cash-rich Mr Packer is seeking the social and business links the well-connected Ms. Steinem and Ms. Carbine can provide,’ I had speculated.1 At the time, I had been quite angry about this deal because Fairfax had made Ms. a similar rights offer, to share copy with Portfolio, its working women’s magazine. This would have seemed a far more natural ‘fit’ for Ms. material than Cleo, although we could not have offered anything like the money Packer paid. I found it strange that the Ms. people had not even responded to our offer, and I had called Pat Carbine to tell her how disappointed I was by this.

  At a dinner with Clyde Packer, Kerry’s brother who lived in Santa Barbara, a few months later, I learned what the talks were really about. He told Sandra and I that James Wolfensohn, the very successful Australian New York-based investment banker who was an adviser to Packer and a friend of Carbine’s, had brokered the deal. As Clyde told it, Wolfensohn had undertaken to look for a new investor for Ms. because Mort Zuckerman was tired of putting money into the magazine. Zuckerman was a wealthy property developer and media proprietor (he owned the weekly news magazine US News & World Report and would later acquire the Atlantic Monthly and New York’s Daily News newspaper) and he was also Gloria Steinem’s boyfriend. Kerry had been prepared to buy 60 per cent of Ms., Clyde said, but only if he could have editorial control. Steinem and Carbine would never agree to that so the deal had foundered. Nevertheless Kerry had paid them $500,000, which Clyde described as a ‘rights’ deal that allowed Cleo to use any material from Ms. This was a hefty injection for an indebted magazine, but it had not been enough to save them.

  Steinem showed no signs of resenting the two women she referred to as ‘real feminists with real money’ who were making an offer for her magazine. Instead we quickly got down to details. First we examined the books of the Ms. Foundation, the not-for-profit body which owned the magazine. We found liabilities of $4.8 million, in addition to $2.2 million worth of subscription liabilities plus $800,000 was needed to publish the final two issues for 1987. All up, around $8 million. The liabilities included deferred salaries for Steinem and Carbine and a loan of $400,000 from Zuckerman. Steinem told me with some bitterness a few months later that Zuckerman had just spent $6 million refurbishing his apartment.

  ‘Half that amount would have saved us,’ she said. In reality, it would have taken a lot more than that.

  Although the dollar amounts were relatively small for a large publisher like Fairfax, doing the Ms. deal was quite complicated. It was not just that we had quickly to get on top of an unfamiliar set of accounts but much of the language, and the way of doing business, was very different from Australia. We discovered, for instance, that the subscriber list which I had thought would be regarded as an asset was regarded by the US tax and accounting regimes as a liability: the income from the subscriptions had been received but the publishers now had an obligation to fulfil those subscriptions, and that obligation cost far more than the subscription income. I had not properly understood that in the US, subscribers generally paid only a fraction of the actual cost of producing and mailing a magazine. I should have realised this because when I first arrived in New York, I had been astounded at how inexpensive it was to subscribe to magazines. For instance, an annual subscription to Vanity Fair cost $12, just $1 an issue, and a big premium on its newsstand price. Now I was discovering why: the production costs and any profit came from advertising revenue. Ms.’s big problem was and—we soon learned—always had been a lack of advertising. And, as we would discover, it was an intractable problem. The major categories of advertisers to women were fashion, cosmetics and food. All of these advertisers demanded supporting, and sympathetic, editorial adjacent to their ads. Most women’s magazines were more than happy to surround these ads with recipes, fashion spreads and makeup tips but Ms. was meant to be different. Its whole premise was that it did not pander to a traditional stereotype of women, instead inviting advertisers to recognise that the Ms. woman was free and independent. She tended to be better-educated and have a higher income than readers of other magazines so she was worth targeting, but while she might cook and wear makeup, and she certainly wore clothes, these were not subjects she wanted to read about in the magazine. It had been a struggle. For all its surface slickness, Madison Avenue was conservative and misogynist, unwilling to buck conventional wisdom about how to reach women. In its early years Ms. had had some success, but as the lustre of feminism faded in the early 1980s, with younger women rejecting the label, and the magazine became more defensive and doctrinaire, the ads fell away. Ms. became reliant on a controversial diet of automobiles, liquor and cigarette advertising, complemented by some distinctly unattractive spreads for feminine hygiene items, and whatever other products they could pick-up, issue to issue. By mid-1987 revenue was collapsing, Ms. was unable to pay its bills and its future looked grim. They were able to produce a nice fat double issue to mark the magazine’s fifteenth anniversary in July/August, but then they immediately did a relaunch that was clearly intended to appeal to advertisers. The final four issues for 1987 showed off the slick new design which, except for the poor quality paper stock and pedestrian art direction, no doubt the result of a tight budget, made Ms. indistinguishable from most other women’s magazines. Gone were the issue-themed covers, instead the smiling faces of well-known or advertiser-alluring women made eye contact with potential readers. One of these women was Cam Starrett, the most senior woman at Avon Products, the cosmetics company (she was Senior VP for Human Resources). Another was Tracey Ullman, the comedian. Ms. was changing its approach and was now courting advertisers, it seemed, but it was too late.

  The first issue of Ms. had appeared as an insert in New York magazine in late 1971, and was followed a few months later by the first stand-alone issue with its iconic cover of a multi-armed Indian goddess, representing the many roles and responsibilities of the modern woman. The print run of 300,000 sold-out within a few
days, proving there was an audience, generating 30,000 subscribers and enabling Steinem to raise $1 million from Warner Communications in order to begin monthly publication. Ms. was an immediate hit. The moment was right, and the magazine quickly developed both influence and a devoted following—and not just in the United States. It became something of a status symbol among many Australian women to brandish the latest issue of Ms. But a loyal audience did not necessarily mean the magazine was financially viable, especially when economic downturns led advertisers to cut back on their spends. For Gloria and Pat Carbine, who came on early as the magazine’s publisher, responsible for the business side, it had been a long hard struggle to keep the magazine afloat. Over the next fifteen years they had borrowed and begged, sought investor funds, donations from well-heeled women and held countless fundraisers. A special and glamorous $250-a-head benefit was held at the Waldorf Astoria in 1984 to mark Steinem’s 50th birthday—and raise money for the Ms. Foundation. ‘This is what 50 looks like’, had been the theme, echoing a comment Steinem had made ten years earlier when someone had said to her: ‘You don’t look 40.’ But despite all the fundraising, the well was now dry. Steinem was desperately looking for a solution, and that was why we were there.

  Although this was the first time I had met Steinem, I knew Pat Carbine from a lunch in Sydney some years earlier hosted by Wendy McCarthy, the feminist and reproductive rights activist, and when I moved to New York in 1986 I had rung her to see if she could recommend a friendly gynaecologist. I was impressed by the warm efficiency of the woman from Ms. who’d got back to me with the information—and an invitation to dinner. Her name was Joanne Edgar, a senior editor who had been there since the beginning. I like these women, I thought to myself at the time, so when that extraordinarily serendipitous chain of events a year later saw me become editor-in-chief of Ms., I had every confidence that I was going to enjoy working with them.

  In late August, just ten days after our first meeting with Steinem and Carbine and as our negotiations were just starting, Warwick Fairfax launched an audacious $2.3 billion bid to take John Fairfax & Sons private. Warwick, aged 26, was the Harvard-educated son of Sir Warwick Fairfax and his third wife, Mary, and was said to be motivated by his view that his older half-brother James was mismanaging the (highly successful, debt-free) company. Young Warwick, as he was always known to distinguish him from his father, was undoubtedly also infected by that 1980s disease: the desire to leverage wealth from assets that were perceived to be under-utilised. We did not know how this turn of events might affect the Ms. acquisition but it seemed prudent that we move as quickly as possible. Three weeks later, on 3 September, we made an offer that comprised cash plus assuming all Ms.’s liabilities—so long as we could take possession of the magazine by the end of September, and subject to approval from the Fairfax Board. A couple of days later I flew to Sydney, to help persuade the board to agree to the purchase—and to undertake a crash course in magazine production.

  It was the first time I had been back to the fourteenth floor of the Fairfax Building in Jones Street since 1976 when Sir Warwick Fairfax—Young Warwick’s father—had summonsed me to his office to discuss my contentious prisons article for the National Times. Now, eleven years later, on 14 September, I was in the boardroom trying not to giggle at the unforgettable sight of the five directors, all men, two of them knights and several of whom would fit the description ‘crusty’, sitting round the imposing board table, solemn oil portraits of Fairfax ancestors looking down on them, flicking through the latest issue of Ms. magazine. I doubt if any of them had even seen a feminist publication before. I walked them through my written proposal, arguing that an outlay of around $12.5 million ($8.5 million acquisition price and $4 million ongoing investment) would give Fairfax a prestigious property that would give the company an immediate profile in the American publishing world, as its buying of the Spectator magazine a few years earlier had done in the UK. I proposed to make Ms. ‘a well-written, argumentative and, at times, controversial news magazine which applies a tough-minded feminist perspective to national events, which provides service information to women, and which through its editorial consolidates and improves upon its already impressive demographics.’

  The timing was terrible—or great, depending on how you read the tea leaves. Could the board approve an acquisition that was not large in dollar terms, but which represented a significant expansion of the company’s US presence, while a takeover offer was on the table? The board was opposed to the takeover and had recommended that shareholders not accept the offer. If Young Warwick succeeded, we faced the hideous prospect that his asset-stripping plans would see the Fairfax magazine group sold on to Kerry Packer and that I would find myself, having left the Fairfax newspaper group, working for Packer. Even worse, the Ms. women, having successfully staved off Packer earlier in the year, and agreed to do business with us in part because we were ‘not Packer’, might find him owning their magazine after all. We hoped we were protected from such a fate by Ms. being acquired by Fairfax Publications (US) Ltd, which was a wholly-owned subsidiary of John Fairfax (US) Ltd, the newspaper company, and not therefore owned by Fairfax Magazines.

  The board signed off on the purchase and Sandra sent a letter of intent to Henry Ansbacher. It was just six weeks since our lunch at Café Un Deux Trois. We’d done it! But it was too soon to celebrate as we quickly found out. The next day New York Newsday broke the story that Australians had bought Ms. but, Gloria told me on the phone from New York, her board was still not convinced. They were now chasing another deal, a venture capital injection that would enable them to retain editorial control of the magazine. There was, on Gloria’s assessment, only an 80 per cent chance the Ms. Foundation Board would accept the Fairfax offer. This was an astonishing turn of events. We thought we had a deal. Instead, here was the first warning sign that Gloria Steinem was not really willing to let go of Ms. magazine.

  It was a very tense time. I spent my days with Gill Chalmers, the experienced and down-to-earth editor of Woman’s Day learning the, to me anyway, mysteries of magazine production and timelines. Every night I was on the phone to New York, lobbying for a favourable decision. Back in New York Sandra was getting on with the business of establishing Sassy. She hired 24-year-old Jane Pratt to be editor-in-chief, brought Cheryl Collins, Dolly’s art director, over from Sydney to start designing a groovy new magazine and hired an advertising agency to start generating buzz. The debut issue of this exciting new publication was slated for March 1988.

  On 23 September, the Ms. board accepted our offer ‘with pleasure’ and with no strings attached. We never learned what happened to the white knight or why the Ms. Foundation ultimately agreed to sell to us, but it was highly likely that Ms. would have been forced to close had they not accepted the Fairfax offer. I flew out of Sydney that same day. In lieu of notice, I gave the Financial Review’s Jenni Hewett the exclusive that Fairfax was now the proud owner of this American feminist icon. On the plane I wrote in my diary how thrilled I was to be embarking on yet another great adventure. And how terrified. This was an astonishing turnaround in my fortunes, and bigger than anything I had ever done before. I hoped that I might be able to bring to Ms. my experience in journalism, my feminist sensibility, and the thorough knowledge of women’s issues I had accumulated while working at OSW. I had the opportunity to remake Ms. so that it was relevant for the 1990s, reflecting where American women were on the still rocky road to true equality and independence, and offering a unique feminist perspective on the issues and obstacles that still stood in their way. I was amazingly confident I could do it. This was the opportunity of a lifetime and I was going to give it everything I had.

  Just a week after the Ms. Foundation accepted our offer, the gloomy scenarios of the previous six weeks suddenly became nightmarishly real. Young Warwick agreed to sell the Financial Review, the Times on Sunday and the Macquarie Network to corporate raider Robert Holmes à Court, and the magazine group and the Canberra Times to Ke
rry Packer. The two newspapers I had worked for until the previous week were both being disposed of. Had it not been for the Ms. deal and my exciting new job, I would have been part of the editorial fodder whose future was now so uncertain. Even worse, and what made me feel both guilty and sad, was that so many of the men who had helped me get this extraordinary new opportunity were now casualties. Max Suich, my long time mentor, Greg Gardiner, Fairfax’s general manager and Fred Brenchley, another long-time friend and a former editor of the Financial Review who had been running the magazine group, would all lose their jobs. No one was able to tell us what the fate of Ms. would be under the proposed new arrangements. Sandra and I went to a celebratory dinner with Gloria and Pat but we did not dare tell them anything until we had concrete information about who was to own Ms. During the dinner Greg Gardiner rang Sandra to say we were ‘Okay’.