by Anne Summers
Sandra and I had expected that, having got to this point of agreement, the papers would be signed right away, but once again we were disappointed. After a quick lunch in the largest conference room, all parties returned to their separate hideaways. ‘What’s holding it up?’ Sandra asked our principal lawyer. ‘It’s just a technicality,’ he replied. ‘Shouldn’t be long now’. But it was several more hours; Chinese food was brought in. I marvelled at the efficiency of it all. New teams of support staff, fresh and ready for work, appeared every few hours to do the photocopying, assembling and delivery of documents as they were amended. Fresh coffee was always on hand and the trays of sandwiches constantly replenished. I presumed it was all part of the service. It was and, like all other services rendered, it was billable. Later, we would receive an account for around $17,000 for these staff, the operating costs of the machines, the coffee, the food and the cost of keeping the air-conditioning running after 6 p.m.
Around 10 o’clock Sandra lay down on the floor under the table in the main conference room and had a sleep. I prowled the corridors, listening to the shouts and curses as, right up to the final moment, deal points were disputed and, in some cases, renegotiated. They’d been at it for around twelve hours. What could possibly be left to argue about? In fact there was very little. These were professional dealmakers and they were sharpening their skills, getting the measure of the other guys against whom they might face-off again, across another table, tomorrow or next week. These were not exactly Tom Wolfe’s Masters of the Universe—although Steve Sherrill undoubtedly saw himself as part of that world—but they had made themselves indispensable to the frenzied money-churning that had become the hallmark of the 1980s. Although this deal was about money—who was lending how much to whom in return for what kinds of considerations—the closing was not taking place downtown in Citibank’s offices on Wall Street, where the money came from. We were in midtown, in the heart of the legal district. The lawyers, as always, had turned the game their way. The longer it went on, the more money they made. The rest of us could not start to make money, or even to function, until they were done.
Finally at 4 a.m. we all gathered again and, blurry-eyed, the principals each signed the many copies of the documents. The bound volume of the deal documents, presented to each of us some weeks later, was almost 20 centimetres thick. As light broke on the first day of July 1988 our new company, Matilda Publications Inc., came into being. We had done it. If it had been exciting enough to buy Ms. on behalf of Fairfax, we could scarcely contain our exhilaration that now it was just the two of us who had bought Ms. and Sassy. If it hadn’t been dawn we might have gone for a drink. Instead, Sandra and I collapsed into the town car that was to take us each home. ‘I never thought we’d celebrate this deal by falling into a coma,’ she said, as we sped off across town into the pink light of the early morning.
CHAPTER EIGHT
MEDIA MOGULETTES IN NEW YORK CITY
Our media empire was just three-weeks-old when catastrophe struck. We were totally blindsided when we learned that Sassy, the star of our little stable, the title that was going to be the financial engine of our company, was about to be brought to her knees by a terrifyingly effective boycott organised by right-wing religious groups. When we did the buyout, Sandra and I had taken on tremendous responsibilities, we knew that, and we were both totally ready to do whatever it took to make it work. We now had 75 staff dependent on us; we had a series of tough bank-imposed financial performance hurdles to meet each month; and a large debt to service. We had to maintain Sassy’s momentum and to continue to build Ms. The frenzy of interest in buying Sassy by America’s largest media companies had convinced us we had a winner. We merely had to keep Sassy on course, and although we knew it would be a hard slog with Ms., we did not doubt for a moment our ability to make this venerated but ailing magazine a commercial success.
For those first few weeks in July, we had basked in our success. If before we had been celebrated, now we were the talk of the town. We discovered that, contrary to its reputation for being cool and blasé about accomplishment, New York loves a success story. The media could not get enough of us. Everyone was keen to get a look at the two Aussie women who in raising all that money on Wall Street to buy the two magazines had achieved what no American woman had done. Even more compelling was the sub-text: we, the unknown outsiders, had been able to do what Gloria Steinem, the feted local celebrity, had never been able to do. We had bought Ms. magazine. We were on top of the biggest town in the world and we were revelling in it.
The invitations poured in. Both of us were now on everyone’s A-list for parties, openings and fundraisers. If I’d wanted to, I could have gone to three or four events every night. I was thrilled to be invited to a party at Leonard Bernstein’s apartment. He now lived in the famous Dakota building on West 72nd Street where, I knew, Yoko Ono still lived; so did Lauren Bacall. But when I looked more closely, I saw that the invitation had a price tag. Like almost everything else in New York, this was a fundraiser and it would cost $5000 to attend. I had had a big pay rise as part of the deal but it wasn’t that big. I still took the subway to work, I still worked in Times Square and I still shopped at Loehman’s, the renowned discount outlet in the Bronx, although now I could afford to venture into stores where the labels were not cut out. I had a generous expense account and I could call anyone in New York or Washington and be confident they would accept an invitation to lunch. Sandra was invited to deliver a prized keynote to the Magazine Publishers Association annual conference, the leading industry event that this year was being held in the Bahamas. It was a gratifying acknowledgement from her peers. I, too, received scores of invitations to speak—women’s groups, editors’ seminars, political events and even the Harvard Business School. In that talk, which I called ‘Media Mogulettes: Organizing a Media MBO in New York City,’ I described to a class of some 50 handpicked, already-successful business leaders from around the world in the Executive MBA program, how we had done the buyout, concentrating on the deal-making and money-raising aspects. I used the word ‘mogulettes’, I explained, not because we were women but because, compared with other media empires, we were small. With just two publications, we scarcely deserved to be called moguls. Not yet at least. Wilma had estimated that within five years Matilda Publications would be worth $100 million. With our 40 per cent equity, Sandra and I would be rich—at least on paper. By then, we fantasised, we would have started, or acquired, other titles and would be on our way towards building a media empire. Or empire-ette. It was mind-boggling. Just a year earlier I had been miserable, lonely and broke and was seriously thinking of abandoning New York for the safe haven of Sydney. Look at me now, I thought, scarcely able to believe it myself.
On 17 July I flew to Atlanta for the Democratic Party Convention, and enjoying my new status as someone able to hang out with the crème de la crème of the party, I spent the four days going from gathering to meeting to cocktail party to dinner. I even looked in on a couple of sessions at the actual convention. Peggy Simpson, our Washington correspondent, escorted me around and she knew everyone. I was thrilled to be introduced to Ann Richards, just before she went on stage to deliver her famous keynote speech mocking Vice-President George H.W. Bush: ‘Poor George, he can’t help it, he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.’ Richards was the state treasurer of Texas and two years later would be elected Governor. She was a tall, slim woman whose piled-up silver hair made her look very striking. ‘Neither snow nor rain can move my hair,’ she liked to say. Her clear blue eyes would engage you immediately and deflect from a face that probably had more lines than it should have at her age. Maybe it was the Texas sun or perhaps it was her former habit of filling her water glass with vodka ahead of dreary meetings. She had already given up the drink by the time I met her. Sadly, she lost her battle for a second term as governor of Texas to George W. Bush, the son of the man she had mocked in Atlanta in 1988.
The 1988 convention nominated Michael Duka
kis, the former governor of Massachusetts, to be the party’s presidential candidate. He would turn out to be a poor choice, easily demolished by the Republican nominee George H.W. Bush, and his hard-nosed team. For some people, the 1988 convention was memorable for the terrible speech by Bill Clinton, a little-known governor from Arkansas, who had been chosen to nominate Dukakis. New York Governor, Mario Cuomo, had instantly gained a national profile in 1984 when he delivered the keynote that attacked Ronald Reagan, as did the relatively unknown state senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, with his speech at the 2004 convention in Boston. But Clinton spoke for too long, had nothing memorable to say and was jeered off the stage. Four years later, when he accepted his party’s nomination to be its presidential candidate, at the convention at Madison Square Garden in New York, Clinton drew laughs when he said he was there to finish the speech he had started four years earlier.
I met a dazzling array of political and other luminaries. At one party I was introduced to Joan Didion. She told me she was covering the convention.
‘I thought you weren’t writing about politics anymore,’ I said spitefully.
‘Whatever gave you that idea,’ she asked?
I realised her agent had not even bothered to tell her about the Ms. assignment. Too paltry? Too demeaning? How would I ever overcome the poor opinion so many people had of Ms.? I would have a similar experience later that year when I met Susan Sontag at a political fundraiser. She was not interested in Ms. magazine, she said to me, and certainly would not dream of writing for it. As soon as someone more interesting appeared—in this case Joe Papp, from the Public Theatre—she turned away from me in mid-sentence and began an animated conversation with him. In October I picked up the New York Review of Books and there was ‘Insider Baseball’, Didion’s essay on the Democratic convention. It would become one of her most famous political pieces, quoted and reprinted for many years afterwards. It was exactly what I had wanted for Ms. I was starting to realise that I would perhaps never be able to attract writers of this calibre.
I returned to my hotel to find a message from Sandra. ‘Call me urgently,’ it said. ‘No matter how late.’ It was after midnight when I reached her.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, thinking nothing could be that urgent.
‘We’ve had our top six advertisers cancel today.’ Sandra spoke with a calmness that merely underscored the calamity she was outlining. ‘That’s $25 million in revenue, doctor, in case you were wondering.’
I listened, stunned, as she explained that the women who had written to complain about Sassy had turned their objections into a fully-fledged consumer boycott, targeting any company that advertised in Sassy. Some weeks earlier we’d received a letter from three women in Wabash, Indiana, who called themselves Women Aglow. Lit by the fire of Jesus, apparently. One of them had a teenage daughter who had got one of our direct mailers seeking subscriptions for Sassy. This mailing had been extraordinarily successful, so it had clearly hit the spot with large numbers of its target market. In just seven months, Sassy’s circulation would reach 450,000. It had taken Elle, previously the hottest new magazine launch in New York, a year to reach that number from its identical launch circulation of 250,000. The material in the mailer that the Wabash women objected to had never actually appeared in Sassy; it had been taken from Dolly, the Australian teenage girls’ magazine that had been Sandra’s model for Sassy, but that was immaterial to the storm that was about to descend on us. Sandra and I had not treated the letter seriously. These women were obviously members of the lunatic fringe, we decided. We did not need to worry about them, especially as the magazine was so clearly such a success with teenage girls—its target market. We could not have been more wrong.
When they failed to get a response from us, Women Aglow took their case to Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority; to Focus on the Family; and to the American Family Association, all of them conservative—I would say right-wing—organisations. They took the women from Wabash very seriously and deployed their considerable resources into a letter-writing campaign. Soon we were getting hundreds of letters daily from around the country. We were definitely concerned about this, but we still thought it was a nuisance, nothing more. We did not for a moment consider that the commercial success of Sassy could be undermined by an organised letter-writing campaign. But these organisations then provided their members with the names and addresses of the men who ran the parent companies of products advertised in Sassy and organised letters to them. No company received more than 500 letters. Most received about 100 but, we were astonished to discover, a small number of what were clearly form letters could influence the advertising decisions of a major American corporation. It made no commercial sense. Why on earth would Tambrands, the makers of Tampax tampons, on the basis of a hundred letters from post-menopausal women, withdraw advertising that was reaching hundreds of thousands of girls who were about to make lifelong choices about which brand of feminine protection they would use? It was the same with the cosmetics giant Revlon. These companies were more sensitive to the complaints of the few than the consumer potential of the very many. Revlon, Tambrands, Noxelle, Schering-Plough, Gillette and even the supposedly progressive Reebok were among the advertisers that cancelled their scheduled advertising and threw our little company into financial turmoil. Then, having tasted victory by hitting our advertising revenues, Falwell and his followers went after our newsstand. Walmart, the largest supermarket chain in the United States, agreed not to stock Sassy, now purported to be an evil magazine. That was bad enough, but small groups of religious women then began visiting drug stores, supermarkets and convenience stores around the country, urging their managers to drop us. Ultimately, 53 chains delisted Sassy, reducing the number of copies in circulation by one-third. We had lost almost all of two of Sassy’s three sources of revenue and the third, subscription revenue, would only hold up so long as we could continue to produce a magazine that sizzled with irreverent content and glossy advertising.
While Sandra and the Sassy advertising team worked the business side trying to lure back the advertisers, prevent further defections and bring in new ones, it was agreed that I would pursue political remedies. We both assumed that once it became known that our right to publish, and even our very livelihood, was being threatened by this boycott there would be public support. Maybe we’d even become a cause celebre. In August I made contact with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and spoke with Melanne Verveer who ran People for the American Way, a liberal advocacy group that had been founded in 1981 by television producer Norman Lear and Congresswoman Barbara Jordan to fight ring-wing extremism, especially by television evangelists. Verveer, who President Obama would appoint as America’s first Ambassador for Global Women’s Issues in 2009, was sympathetic and had some practical advice. She compared our situation with the Christian attacks on the recently released Martin Scorsese film, The Last Temptation of Christ. ‘The movie’s producers had got religious leaders to view the film and give frank assessments,’ she said. We needed to follow that example and get credible people—parents, adolescent development experts, even kids—to speak out for us. It was good advice and Sandra and I were grateful for her support. But, to my astonishment, the ACLU was dismissive. The right to free speech was paramount in their eyes, which gave the boycotters equal rights with us publishers; they declined to help us. I soon formed the view that the ACLU’s purist stance made them useless, both politically and morally. They have a long track record of defending Nazis and other extreme right-wing groups’ right to speak and to march, even when such gatherings have led to violence, such as occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. Then, a young woman was killed when a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd.
It soon became depressingly obvious that no person or organisation was spontaneously going to speak out in our defence, and we did not have the resources to organise such support. We learned that other media organisations experienced similar boycotts but they kept very quiet about
them, taking the view that publicity might encourage other boycotts. Besides, these larger companies could absorb the lost revenue in a way that was impossible for a tiny, indebted outfit like ours. The other way, of course, would have been to fight back, to deny this punishing minority the right to impose its anachronistic views on the majority but there was not much of that in the Reagan years in America. Sandra and I were astounded at the passivity, and the lack of courage, of those we had hoped might stand shoulder-to-shoulder beside us. We even detected a certain amount of glee at our predicament from an industry that was jealous that Sandra had turned the teenage category upside down. Despite what was happening right now, teenage magazines would never again be the same. Sassy attracted envy, criticism and—that most reliable arbiter of success—imitation, although it would be fifteen years before the launch of Teen Vogue, the magazine that most faithfully followed in the footsteps of Sassy. To many in the industry, we were Aussie upstarts, politically naíve, and lacking savvy about the American right-wing.
In September 1988, just weeks into the boycott, we had been unable to meet our first-quarter interest payments. Just three months after we had launched our company, we were technically in default. We had a shortfall in income of between $800,000 and $1 million a month, as a result of the collapse in Sassy’s revenue and slower-than-expected ad sales for Ms. The precipitous decline in the company’s revenues meant that our ambitious plans for Sassy and Ms. first had to be cut back then, very rapidly, abandoned. Hiring was frozen, and we cancelled our trade advertising plans and direct mail campaigns. We were now having almost daily meetings with the panicked bankers, who did not want to have to report back to their bosses that this high-profile deal was already in trouble. But our performance hurdles were so high, based on the assumption that Sassy’s income would continue to rise, that while we did our best to maintain business as usual, it was not long before we were looking at disaster. In late January 1989, the State Bank of NSW advised us that we could not draw down the $200,000 revolving line of credit that we needed to meet our payroll, and by mid-February we had completely run out of money. Citibank said they were no longer prepared to put more money in; they proposed that half the company be sold.
