by Mark Dapin
Naylor gave up his dream when he started to receive death threats. The two remaining Tests were cancelled, and England won by default, although Australia did take out the dwarf-bowling crown. In 1995, the Queensland government pathologist, Associate Professor David Williams, performed an autopsy on an unnamed 33-year-old dwarf who had taken part in the Queensland contest. He was found to have dementia pugilistica – the same condition as punch-drunk boxers.
The Picture was born of People in September 1988, the year after Kerry Packer bought Fairfax Magazines. At Fairfax, Naylor had been under pressure to accept advertisements from the adult-video industry. Naylor felt this would damage the magazine. He was worried that the editorial content would rush downmarket to meet the advertising, that People would lose its eclectic identity and become a cheap alternative to Penthouse.
Naylor was unhappy, and his staff imagined themselves snubbed in the elevators and corridors, unwanted socially and unrespected professionally. People had only been at ACP for a few months when the former executives of Fairfax Magazines, including John B Fairfax, regrouped as Century Publishing and approached Naylor with an idea. An idea in magazine publishing is usually, ‘Let’s do the same thing that somebody else is doing (but cheaper)’. Century’s idea was, ‘Let’s do the same thing we used to do again.’
They were prepared to put money behind a weekly rival to People, and to assure Naylor they would not accept pornography ads. Naylor left ACP to start The Picture from Century’s Commonwealth Street headquarters in Surry Hills. Naylor told the press The Picture would be ‘cheeky, flirtatious and less sleazy than People and Post. ‘We hope to create a better environment for advertisers,’ he said, created by Century’s decision to ban most ‘sleazy sex ads’. He wanted to appeal to ‘women who had previously felt uncomfortable with this market’ and ‘male readers who have previously felt they couldn’t leave a magazine like People lying around the house’.
No magazine in Australian publishing history strayed so far from its original brief as The Picture.
The Picture was younger, dumber, more exuberant and crass than People. It was a parody of mainstream journalism; its ridiculous scoops were delivered with po-faced, hectoring self-righteousness.
From the beginning, the magazine embraced the proposition that very fat people are very funny indeed. In the first nine weeks of its history, it published a story about the Fat Pride Conference in San Francisco; a 394 kilogram German who once ate fourteen chickens in a single sitting (‘How Fat Albert Ate A Farm’); a 152 kilogram English woman who claimed she did not eat much but drank a lot (‘Sponge Woman Gets Fat On Water’); and a 380 kilogram American who had gone on a diet in the hope of finding a girlfriend (‘World’s Biggest Fatso Slims For Sex’).
Later came ‘Can you help this human balloon BEFORE SHE EXPLODES?’ The Picture had borrowed from the UK newspaper Sunday Sport the idea of capitalising words mid-sentence. The technique was used to typical effect in the sad tale of 286 kilogram Ruth Lawrence, who was searching for a diet that would save her life:
Ruth, 47, even volunteered to join a research group studying obesity at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, but the GROSSLY INSENSITIVE team of scientists told her: ‘NO THANKS, TUBBY, YOU’RE TOO FAT.’ To add to her HUGE feelings of despair they told her to come back later, WHEN SHE WAS DEAD. By donating her body to science, they said, doctors may be able to help future generations of incredibly overweight people.
The Sunday Sport gave The Picture more than scattergun capitalisation. Founded in 1986 by multimillionaire pornographer David Sullivan, the Sport was the next vulgar step in the debasement of the press that had long been the project of The Sun, Britain’s biggest selling tabloid. The Sun readers loved page three, so Sullivan’s idea was a paper with a page-three girl on pages 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 etc. The Sport soon became more concerned with what was going on in space than mundane events on Earth. It met aliens at every improbable juncture. In a pub in Walsall, it came across an American tourist who had been impregnated by an alien (‘. . . And He Stole Our Love Child’, which explained the absence of progeny). It found an alien baby in a jam jar, and another killed by a cheeseburger. On 24 April 1988, it scored its biggest scoop, with the front-page headline ‘World War 2 Bomber Found On The Moon’. The story was a madman’s tapestry of ludicrous journalist-generated speculation, a doctored photograph and invented quotes. The writers gave equal weight to three theories: (1) Adolph Hitler ‘in a space suit’ had escaped the fall of Berlin in the 1941 Flying Fortress, and had been planning to hijack Neil Armstrong’s landing craft in 1969; (2) The plane had fallen through the Bermuda Triangle, which ‘explained’ how a bomber with a range of 300 miles had made a 250 000 mile trip; (3) The picture was a fake. Two weeks later, when the Sport could produce no evidence to support its finding, it produced a further front-page scoop: ‘World War 2 Bomber Found On Moon Vanishes!’
The Picture had a topless role model – a barbershop newspaper that was selling more than 500 000 copies a week – but it was not yet entirely ready to jump into bed and romp with her. The Picture subs had Sunday Sport stuffed into their back pockets, but Naylor was still carrying around Pix-People in his head.
Every cover of The Picture except one featured a smiling Aussie girl. There are Ten Immutable Rules of Magazine Publishing, which apply equally to Cleo, Playboy, Harper’s Bazaar or Ralph. Rule Number One is: Beautiful Women Sell Magazines. Thanks to David Naylor, we know Rule Number Two: Crashing Aeroplanes Do Not Sell Magazines. The Picture number four had a cover showing two aeroplanes colliding in an air show disaster, and circulation nosedived by fifty per cent. The Picture never again ran a cover that did not feature a woman – or, at least, part of one.
On 1 April 1989, The Picture carried the ‘Astounding Triple Exclusive’ of ‘My Three Boobs’. The cover showed a three-breasted model taking off her three-cup bra. Even more astounding than the fact that a three-breasted woman had been found was the fact that the same woman had been a Picture pin-up just four months before – with only two breasts. The magazine explained her transformation was due to hormone treatment that had gone horribly wrong, and labelled her ‘Once, Twice, Three Times A Lady’.
As in the UK, the mainstream media could not understand that a magazine might simply make something up. Channel 9’s A Current Affair rang The Picture to get contact details for the three-breasted freak. The Hinch show believed it, too.
The Picture regularly reprised the joke. It later found a four-breasted girl, then a five-breasted girl, who had to have her top three breasts removed by surgery.
We started to typeset The Picture in May 1989. I remember the first set of coverlines included:
Nudes Tell Prudes. . .
‘We’ll Bare Our Boobs Or Force Men To Cover Theirs’
It was almost a haiku.
In the next issue was an obituary for David Wilson, a dwarf stuntman who drank himself to death. Wilson had supposedly paid for his beers by going into bars and saying, ‘Give me as much money as I can drink tonight and I’ll let you throw me as far as you can.’
This gave Naylor a chance to reprise his finest hour, and stage a search for an Australian dwarf who could play Wilson in a movie about his life.
‘Dwarfly duties will include dressing in a crash helmet and harness and allowing 16 burly contestants to throw you onto an air mattress,’ announced the magazine, with familiar relish.
The staff of The Picture were bound together by a feeling that they were the little guys going up against the big bully, armed only with the traditional weapon of the oppressed: a better sense of humour. ACP tried to lure them back with pay rises, and the subs would put their calls on the speakerphone, to let the whole office hear them. They did not take the money, and Naylor was proud of that – so the staff were shocked when, in July, he announced he was going back to Kerry Packer.
They saw his move as treachery, but Naylor believed he was continuing on the same lonely path. At Century, The Picture had little advertising
beyond mail-order trades courses, spray-on pheromone scents guaranteed to make ‘nine out of ten’ men more attractive to women, and a couple of pages of dildos and porn movies. Management were again pressuring Naylor to embrace the sex-video industry, but at ACP, publisher Richard Walsh had promised he could relaunch the Pix title, a true barbershop weekly unburdened by ads for ‘8-inch black veined vibes’ and ‘Lovable Judy Dolls’.
Naylor returned to Park Street as editor-in-chief of People and Pix, leaving his former deputy, Gerry Reynolds, as editor of The Picture. The staff were happily outraged, wilfully naive. They worked harder, pulled more tightly together, and the magazine’s circulation grew like a wart on the nose of publishing.
Reynolds’ The Picture was like a foaming, feral, brazenly unreliable tabloid newspaper with four pages of page-three girls. It loved streakers, nude sunbathers and topless barmaids, but it gave more space to freaks, fatties, aliens, and now dogs. Issue after issue, dogs were discovered in strange situations: ‘Dog Runs Petrol Station’, ‘Dog Rides Horse’, ‘Two Dogs Run For Election’, ‘Dog Eats Backyard’, ‘Dead Cats Save Dog’.
Reynolds found a fat stripper, Gert Bucket – ‘Flabber Ghaster – She’s Three Strippers Rolled Into One’ – but no thrown dwarves. Under Reynolds, stories started with a photograph, and the subs would write around the image. For example, an innocent picture of a South African midget prompted the story ‘World’s Smallest Boy Falls Down a Dunny Bowl’.
The difference between Naylor’s The Picture and Reynolds’ could be seen when the magazine again found the king of rock and roll, but this time he was black, lived in a remote Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory, called himself Samuel Billabong, had ‘grown his hair and beard, had a medical TATTOO treatment to make his skin DARKER in a reverse of the “pigment buffing” technique performed on US entertainer Michael Jackson, and was learning the language of his NEW WIVES’. He had also disguised his singing voice. The same issue discovered Andy Warhol in a Sydney nightclub.
In September, The Picture ran a topless centrefold of Princess Di. It looked as if the artists had cut her head out of a photograph and glued it onto the body of a nude model – which, in effect, they had – but that issue sold 100 000 copies when the average sale was about 70 000. Next came the Phantom Turd Thrower. A man had been dropping shit on pedestrians from a perch in the Brisbane Transit Centre. The Picture staged a re-enactment of his crime, from the moment his bowels started moving.
ACP bought The Picture in October 1989, for a roumered $6 000 000. The staff were traded along with the magazine. Once again, an outrage had been committed against the subs’ bench. For a young title, The Picture already had a substantial mythology: it had been expelled from the paradise that was Fairfax Magazines, sold into slavery to the evil pharaoh Packer, broken its chains and had been led to a promised land by Moses Naylor, who had then betrayed them by signing a biblically unprecedented Moses–Pharaoh Pact that forced them back to Babylon – on their existing wages. Of course Fairfax wasn’t Paradise, Packer wasn’t the Pharaoh and, as was quickly proved, Naylor was no Moses – his children wouldn’t follow him back.
When Naylor went to Commonwealth Street to round them up, the subs and designers walked silently past him and into the pub. They held a boozy meeting, and decided they could not be bought. They were workers, not chairs.
Phil Snoswell, my boss and I were invited to the KB Hotel after The Picture staff had resolved to stay together and reject ACP’s offer. They were thrilled with themselves, bubbling with cheap beer and enthusiasm. The subs’ bench felt that they – not the masthead, not the editor, and not the topless girls – were The Picture, and The Picture’s success would travel with them.
We agreed we would continue to be The Picture’s typesetter. Everybody swore loyalty to everyone else – but within a couple of weeks, half the staff went over to ACP. Gerry Reynolds, chief sub Oliver Robb, and Lachlan Brown, probably the best writer among them, declined to produce the first ACP issue of The Picture.
The refuseniks put an advert in The Sydney Morning Herald saying, ‘The Picture has been sold but the staff have not. Call this number if you’re interested in the best subs team in the country’. There were calls, but they came to nothing.
Naylor appealed to Reynolds, pointing to the Phantom Turd Thrower story – ‘Look what you’ve done to my magazine!’ he said – but the core of the subs team would not even talk to him. They never crossed to ACP, and have never worked there since.
Naylor struggled to pump out The Picture with only half the staff, and with Tony Murphy as the editor. He felt let down by journalists he had considered his friends. Their rejections reflected badly on him at ACP, and the upheaval set the tone for the tumultuous, volatile years to come at Park Street.
We continued to typeset The Picture while ACP organised the transfer to desktop publishing, then we lost the contract, as we eventually lost all our magazine work, and I did not think much about The Picture until 1995, when I found myself working there.
While I was employed at the typesetters, I wrote a piece for The Sydney Morning Herald, and the paper bought it. I did not realise how odd it was that an untrained journalist should be able to place stories in the Herald – but the same thing had happened to me in the UK, with The Guardian.
I had few difficulties adjusting to life in Sydney, but the first time I asked for twenty cigarettes, the shopkeeper gave me twenty packets. I could not bring myself to call a big beer glass ‘a schooner’. It sounded like a joke word, baby talk, so I would always point to somebody else’s glass and ask for ‘one of those’. For a year, I answered the question ‘how are you?’ with a detailed summary of my health. I could not get used to saying ‘see you later’ to people I would never see again, and it was a long time before I was brave enough to wear shorts in public.
I loved Australia, and every day I remembered how lucky I was to be here, and how short a time I had on a one-year working-holiday visa. My mates left – Guy went back to England; Chris found an improbable job as an accountant in the Solomon Islands; we slowly lost touch with backpackers and made friends with Australians and New Zealanders. They were easy people to get to know. They had all travelled themselves, bought Thai sticks on Khao San Road and black hash in Brixton, lived in damp Gloucester Road dormitories and shared houses in Earls Court, and they did not care that you were not from around here.
I wanted to know about Australia like I knew about England. I read library books, old magazines and newspapers, and spoke with strangers in pubs: were there skinheads in Australia? Were there teddy boys and punks? Were there riots at the football? Did the army go to Asia? Was there conscription during the wars? Who were the gangsters? Who were the mercenaries? Where did they drink and die? I heard about the Saints, Radio Birdman and Neddy Smith, Tom Domican, Painters and Dockers, Sallie-Anne Huckstepp, Gough Whitlam, Jeff Fenech, Cliff Hardy, police corruption and Vietnam.
I was teaching myself what I would need to know to edit a men’s magazine.
THREE In which I get married, write a
Forum Letter and watch a porn video
Australian Playboy was the local edition of the US magazine that would have its readers imagine themselves as dinner-jacketed, martini-drinking, politically liberal, sexually successful, cigar-smoking men of the world – while they are masturbating over a photograph of a sixteen-year-old girl lying by a swimming pool. I had read about the Playboy Mansion, with its bunny girls and spas, but it had limited relevance to a dole boy sucking tramp juice in Coventry. However, for a 27-year-old proofreader whose daily diet included the low-fat cottage cheese recipes in Australian Slimming and the riboflavin content of Corn Flakes, Playboy features were rich, gamey meat.
We used to typeset Australian Playboy for publisher Mason Stewart, and the two South African Jims and I would bicker politely over who would read it. Playboy was started in the US by Hugh Hefner in 1953. Hefner worked for a publisher of cheesecake glamour magazines, which ran the usual g
irl-in-spotted-bikini-with-one-hand-behind-her-neck pin-ups and nudists-playing-volleyball-in-the-sunshine stories. He saw a potential market for a more sophisticated publication, and bought a set of Marilyn Monroe nudes for the first cover, which resulted in extraordinary sales. There are Ten Immutable Rules of Magazine Publishing. Number Three is: Celebrity Nudes Sell Out Magazines.
Playboy’s glamour was shot in soft colours, with Vaseline-modulated voyeurism. To legitimise the nudes in his magazine – and to legitimise his own famously licentious lifestyle – Hefner learned to ride the back of the sexual revolution. He presented Playboy as part of the culture of the permissive society, and made common cause with the first wave of libertarian feminists. He published fiction from the best US writers – including Truman Capote, John Updike and Saul Bellow – and long, long interviews with political, sporting and cultural heroes from Muhammad Ali to Malcolm X, John Lennon to Fidel Castro, Gore Vidal to Ted Turner. (This led to the Playboy reader’s celebrated justification: ‘I only buy it for the articles.’)
Australian Playboy had been launched by ACP in 1979, but Kerry Packer quickly lost interest in the project, and the licence was taken up by small publisher Mason Stewart. Mason Stewart never had enough capital to run a high-profile magazine like Playboy. The company was a bottom-line publisher, happy to sit in the lowest quadrant of any genre. It kept costs low and eked out small profits. Material from the US edition was used wholesale, and local content was gradually marginalised.
In the US, the more explicit Penthouse coaxed Playboy into fighting the ‘beaver wars’. As the legs of Penthouse Pets edged wider apart, the sales gap with Playboy narrowed. Playboy briefly tried to match Penthouse for gynaecological detail, but withdrew when it became clear the magazine was being dragged into a vaginal Vietnam, a war it could never win. The battle was mirrored in Australia, where Penthouse’s most potent weapon was the Pets’ inner labia, but its editorial was also stronger. Penthouse’s muscular, Australian low-life prose noir was better than most of the material Playboy could afford.
