by Mark Dapin
There was to be no more of Barry, and no more whining about feminism. This was a commercial decision, as well as a moral one. I have spent thousands of nights in hundreds of pubs. I have talked about everything men talk about – which is not much – and I have never had a conversation about feminism. Few Ralph readers would have met a conscious feminist. By 1998, feminism sounded boring, the kind of thing their girlfriends’ mothers might be into, like quilting or The Bill. It did not make for sensational stories, unless feminists suddenly started growing extra breasts, or marrying hamsters, or throwing lesbian dwarfs.
Magazines are for enthusiasts. They are advocates for their readers. They are not against things. From now on, Ralph’s editorial voice – like The Picture’s – would be enthusiastic about everything. It would be in favour of all the good things in life: girlfriends, kebabs, twist-tops, parties, pubs, sport, action movies, comedies, robots, aliens, and shaving off your best mate’s eyebrows when he falls asleep on the couch. If it did not like something – such as housework – it would behave as if it did not exist. This is more or less what men do, anyway.
I banned words like ‘tart’, ‘slut’, ‘dog’ and ‘sheila’. All the women would be babes, and the cover girls would be worshipped as goddesses. I never wanted to read about ‘men’s issues’. They are garbage. Nobody cares about how masculinities are constructed in contemporary society. There is no such thing as a new lad, or a sensitive new age guy, or a metrosexual. Young men are the same as they always have been – terrified heroes, dud studs, nervously confident, violently friendly. They want to fight like Bruce Lee and fuck like Tommy Lee, and to know everything without ever having learned a lesson. I knew that, because I never grew up.
That is how I improved the magazine. This is how I made it worse: I had started reading Might, a small US magazine which ran pacy, playful, whimsical features based around quirky ideas such as gathering together a number of people called Phil Thomson in the town of Phil Thomson, PA, largely so it could run captions such as ‘Left to right: Phil Thomson, Phil Thomson, Phil Thomson, Phil Thomson’. I thought there must be many other magazines like this in the world, and I could turn Ralph into a kind of international digest of whimsy. Might folded as soon as I started on Ralph, but I pursued my stupid dream through other means, buying stories I had read in the British newspaper, The Independent, and in the UK Sunday Telegraph magazine.
If you scour the world, you can find any story you like. There is always a place where a man wants to marry his tractor, or a woman with two vaginas is cohabiting with Siamese twins. For some reason, that place is usually Turkey. I had the chance to create a magazine that reflected life as it was lived in Australia, so why was I babbling on about Europe?
FHM and Men’s Health were both full of fraudulent ‘Australianised’ copy – features lifted from the parent magazine, but with London changed to Melbourne, New York to Sydney, Chevvies to Holdens, and Spice Girls to Kylies. After a few months, I realised I could do something better.
Marketing people often ask, ‘What is your point of difference?’
A good answer might be, ‘This is,’ followed by a crashing headbutt to the bridge of their nose.
However, my point of difference was that Ralph was going to be true. The things it said happened in Australia really did happen in Australia.
ACP had cut a deal with US Maxim, the market-leading US ‘lads’ mag’. It was a shocking arrangement, first because it encouraged Ralph to plunder irrelevant-but-slick stories, but worse because it did not include any arrangement for buying the photography. If we used too little Maxim copy, we were paying ten times the Australian market rate. If we bought too much, we read like a US magazine. Either way, we were hostage to whatever rate Maxim felt like quoting for the pictures. What we really needed from Maxim was its covershoots. In men’s publishing as in men’s lives, the central problem is persuading women to take off their clothes. Maxim was more seductive than Ralph because it could offer international exposure, it could pay much more money, and it was not called Ralph. Under the terms of the agreement, however, Maxim would not help us.
Ralph’s first cover star, Melissa Tkautz, came courtesy of Richard Bajic, an eccentric photographer who had ingratiated himself with local actors and their hangers-on. Bajic approached Ralph with topless shots of Tkautz, but Seddo wanted the Loaded-style cheesecake look – so-called because a newspaper editor in 1915 supposedly described a photograph of a Russian opera singer with her skirt hitched up as ‘better than cheesecake’. Cheesecake – sensuality by implication – is the look that sells everything from sunscreen to sports cars. Internationally, it was also selling men’s magazines again, for the first time since the 1960s.
Ralph was promoted as part of a backlash against feminism, but it could just as easily have been painted as a backlash against pornography. At a time when a desperate US Penthouse was responding to the emerging challenge of internet porn by regularly showing naked Pets urinating, Ralph girls wore short dresses and swimwear. Bajic reshot Tkautz in a more muted style, and persuaded former soapie star Toni Pearen to go on the cover of issue two.
The women had to seem accessible, approachable, as if the reader might meet them in the street, but photographers instinctively tried to turn them into movie stars. Every stylist wanted the pictures to look like pages from Cosmopolitan. Ralph needed girls next door, with natural make-up and natural hair, shot under quite flat, full-width lighting, but photographers favoured moody lighting that picks up every tiny flaw on a woman’s skin.
Ralph secured an English newspaper shoot of Natalie Imbruglia, which ran on the cover three months before she became a world-famous singer, while she was still just an out-of-work Neighbours star. Imbruglia was the first cover model whose breasts Chriso had to enlarge to fill out her bra. She was followed by superannuated Neighbours actor Melissa Bell. She posed apparently naked, with her legs folded and her arms across her breasts, but she had just had a baby, so Chriso had to cut deeply into the curves of her thighs, to give her back her pre-pregnancy body.
Then came Maypril, with Emmaaah! Harrison’s breasts airbrushed over the neck of her blue dress, and then came me – and I did not have a clue. I knew Loaded made a fuss about soap stars, but I assumed it was an ironic joke. I did not realise there was any continuity of content between the pornos and the lifestyle magazines. I thought the lifestyle magazines were simply a more broadly based offshoot of the music-and-style press – which, at first they were. I told Chriso I was only interested in getting better stories, and the look of the magazine, and the cover girls, were his territory. I asked Chriso why we had girls on the cover at all. He told me that history showed girls sold, men did not. This was an answer, but it was not an explanation. Somebody from Marketing told me the girls were ‘aspirational’, which I puzzled over for a long time, before I realised ‘aspirational’ is the only adjective most marketing people know.
Australian women’s water polo squad goalkeeper Liz Weekes had recently been voted the ‘Sexiest Sportswoman in the World’ by readers of a German magazine, and she was to be my first cover. I did not even know water polo was an organised sport. Weekes looked like a classic Queensland beach girl: big-boned pretty, tanned, outdoorsy, athletic and strong. She worked out, which gave her big triceps – so we trimmed them down. Her thighs were large and muscular because she was constantly treading water – so we trimmed them down. The muscle that led from her shoulder to her breast bulged over her décolletage – so we rebuilt the strap then gave her a flatter, weaker muscle. Weekes was famous for playing water polo, but we redesigned her body so it would be impossible for her to excel at her sport. We gave her the same build as Melissa Tkautz. In fact, our aim was to give every woman the same build as Melissa Tkautz.
Modelling agents and theatrical agents, who hated our ad campaign and our name, instructed their clients not to work with us. It was difficult even to buy old shoots from photo agencies, since many were subject to ‘publicist’s approval’. When the pu
blicist – and no vocation has ever been so misnamed as ‘publicist’ – in Beverly Hills or Bloomsbury, heard a magazine called Ralph wanted to use the pictures, they sniggered and shook their heads, often dislodging the last grains of coke from their nostrils.
We continually returned to the same names, offering more money, and got laughed out of the conversation. While Ralph was struggling to entice down-on-their-luck soap stars into the magazine for thousands of dollars, the first issue of FHM Australia was released. It had a gatefold cover, starring Mimi Macpherson, Isla Fisher and Emma Harrison – and publishers EMAP did not pay them a cent.
EIGHT In which Anthony Mundine chases
Solomon Haumono who chases the Pleasure
Machine, Mimi Macpherson suffers back
problems and the Doner eats its own shit
Editing a magazine is a fantastic, frustrating, exhilarating, all-consuming, intoxicating, terrifying, fascinating, soul-destroying, addictive, magnificent waste of time. A morning lasts a minute; a week is over before you have had time to go out for lunch; a year telescopes into a month. You’re on a continual emotional bender, filling and draining yourself, congratulating and flagellating yourself, falling in and out of love.
The next day begins before the last one has ended, as you try to figure out what can be done tomorrow that was not done today, and if you will get to the printer on time even though the art department has twenty pages left to design, and one of the designers is sick, and the art director has to put together an urgent promo for the marketing department, and the advertising salespeople have lied about the number of pages they have sold, and suddenly you have to find a new story and pictures to fill the spread that was reserved for an imaginary motoring client. When you get into the office you can’t open the door because for the first time this month you have come in without your keys and for the first time this month security have come around and locked everything, and you log into a journalist’s PC and there are emails from the readers complaining that their last-month’s subscriber’s copy was squeezed through their letterbox a week after it reached their local newsagency, and your staff arrive, and security arrives, and your phone rings and it’s Trixie from a PR company wanting to know if you received the fax about the Big Day Out, and a sub-editor comes in and says she can’t take it anymore, you have to do something about the production editor, and it’s 9.50 am and the art director hands you a dozen proofs that have to be read before ten o’clock. You glance at them quickly, and the one page you didn’t look at on the screen – the only design you did not veto in the whole magazine – is horribly wrong, an abortion of your idea, and the headline is misspelled and the photo caption incorrectly identifies a good friend of the proprietor as a convicted sex murderer, and the fashion editor wants to talk about the clothes for next month, and you know you have to because she has to begin shooting tomorrow. But the phone rings and it’s Kylie from a PR company wanting to know if you received the fax about men’s face creams, and your boss comes in and folds his arms and legs and he wants a chat, because it is not deadline day for him, because he does not have any deadlines anymore, and he asks how was last night, and you struggle to remember, because it doesn’t feel like you have ever left the office, and the art director comes in asking for the proofs back, and marketing comes in, demanding the promo, and advertising rings up to tell you they’ve sold one page of the two, as long as you don’t mind putting an ad for counter-fungal cream in the fashion pages.
Meanwhile your email is filling up with messages from your staff, who want to know when you are going to come out of your office, and Trixabelle from a PR company wants to know if you’ve received the fax about the new Holden Commodore, and you ring a freelancer and say, ‘Can you get me eight hundred words about jelly snakes?’ to fill the space where the ad has dropped out, and you email the photo editor to tell him to look for pictures of jelly snakes, and he asks, ‘Where am I going to find pictures of jelly snakes?’, and Carlee from a PR company wants to know if you’ve received the fax about the new sanitary towels, and you ask, ‘Do you know this is a men’s magazine?’ She says ‘I thought you might be putting together a gift guide for your girlfriend,’ and you curse yourself for saying anything, and the tower of proofs on your desk is growing like stalagmites on steroids, but you can’t look at them because Marketing want you to look over this fantastic press release they have commissioned from a company called Fantastic Press Releases who have spelled the name of your magazine wrong, and the on-sale date is wrong, and Kristyl from Fantastic Press Releases wants to know if you got the press release about cheese, and the art director comes in and says, ‘If you don’t give me the proofs now, we won’t make deadline’. The chief sub bursts in holding the story about jelly snakes at least a metre from her nose, as if it smells like the fetid corpse of an ad guy, savagely butchered by an editor and buried in a pit of manure, and says she can’t work on this, it’s rubbish, and instead of clearing the last six pages, she sits there and tells you why it stinks, while you proofread the cover and talk on the phone. You are almost ready to send the magazine to the printer when the entire computer system crashes.
You ring the IT help desk, but most of the technical-support staff are on a midweek team-building exercise organised by HR, so you spend half an hour sweating and trembling and pacing and frowning, until a pale, gangly nineteen-year-old dressed like Dracula lopes in and fixes everything by hitting six buttons with his virgin’s fingers, and the photo editor pops up with a sickle grin on his face because he’s found pictures of supermodels eating jelly snakes, they’re a bit expensive and he wants to know if he should buy them or not, you say ‘buy’ and immediately get a call from Advertising expecting congratulations because they have sold the last page – a page which, until that morning, they’d told you had been sold, anyway – so you don’t need the jelly snakes story.
Then the publisher comes in and looks at the cover and says, ‘You can’t do that. Green doesn’t sell’, and you think he’s a fraud, an impostor, a shameless salary sucker, when suddenly he says, ‘And Danni is spelt with two ‘i’s, by the way’ and you realise that even though you typed it in as Dannii, the subs fact-checked the name as Dannii, the first proof went out with Dannii, and every semi-literate person in the office knows her name is spelled Dannii, one of the artists accidentally deleted it, then typed ‘Danny Minoge’ in 104-point capitals across the cover. The subs are leaving, even though there is still work to do, because you are not allowed to pay overtime, and the only people who offer to stay behind are those who would do more harm than good, and it’s seven o’clock then eight o’clock then nine o’clock then ten o’clock, and the only thing left to do is take the art director to the pub and drink more beer than any journalist in the history of the press, then you bowl yourself into a taxi and throw yourself into your flat, and fall on the couch and pour One More Beer, when suddenly you realise Dannii’s name is Minogue, not ‘Minoge’, and you know you will get no sleep tonight, not one minute.
Nobody told me how to be an editor. There was no training, and no job description. I only knew what I had learned from watching editors in the past – but editing is not a particularly visual task. Editors spend much of the day on the phone, and it is hard to tell if they are brokering an international deal for exclusive rights to the new Martin Amis story, or dialling 1-800-WET-MAMMA.
I spent an infuriating amount of time returning phone calls from girls with erotic-sounding names, who were on another line when I replied. When I asked what sort of company I had called, it was always a PR firm – except once, when I was told it was a business devoted to sending other businesses faxes, then calling to see if people had received them. If I meet the man who founded that company, I will tear off his arms and beat him to death with them.
At first, it seemed I was expected to spend much of my time in meetings with people – often the same people – explaining what I was doing, but the more time I spent in meetings, the less I was doing.
&nbs
p; Magazines work to tight, daily, rolling deadlines. Every day, stories are read by the editor, sent to art, passed on to subs, or dispatched to the printers. The editor has to approve the story, the layout, the cut and the final proof. This is difficult if the editor is in a meeting with the publisher, the editor-in-chief, the advertising manager, the marketing manager, the marketing assistant, the circulation manager, the research manager, the production manager and the financial analyst. Many of these people do not have tight, daily, rolling deadlines. The publisher has no deadlines at all, and no function beyond calling and attending meetings. There is a gulf like Carpentaria between the cultures of editorial staff and everybody else. Corporate people have careers, which they have to advance, while editorial staff have jobs, which they have to do.
There was a general feeling that Ralph had to redefine what it was about. In order to help us decide Ralph’s new direction, a meeting was called to which everybody was required to bring an object that represented Ralph, and a song that symbolised Ralph. Even The Picture’s fantastically comprehensive guide to fouler English usage did not contain a word to express the sense of futility engendered in somebody trying to produce a monthly magazine when somebody who is not trying to produce a monthly magazine instructs them to take time out to consider what kind of object represents that magazine (‘breasticles’ seems somehow inadequate).
The meeting was held in a room decorated like the induction class at infants’ school. Somebody who did not have tight, daily, rolling deadlines assembled a collage of photographs, and we all had to choose a picture of the face of Ralph.
