by Mark Dapin
‘Go on, smile. Why don’t you smile?’
We left the bar for the back room, where strippers on their break were passing around a bong. Everyone got stoned except Read and me. We left together to call cabs on the cold streets of Hobart.
I spoke to Read a few more times at Ralph. He phoned me with a hot tip on a horse. I backed it $50 to win, and it did not even place. When drug dealer, standover man and rapist ‘Mad’ Charlie Hegyali was shot dead outside his Melbourne home, I asked Read to write an obituary. The last time he had spoken to Hegyali, Read wrote, ‘The conversation danced around comic topics such as Charlie’s continual bouts of venereal disease, for which he had been medically treated since the age of 14, and his habit of going to the jack clinic for his injections, then picking up whores in the waiting room,’ and the philosophical, ‘You’re always sad when an old friend dies, even though Charlie probably had it coming.’
Read attached what seemed to be a piece of short fiction about him and Mad Charlie when they were young. I told him I wanted ‘true crime’, but Read implied there was no such thing – and perhaps he was right. As Read’s publisher once said, ‘All crims are liars, and mine is the biggest liar of them all.’
I sent journalist Denis Brown to bolster the story with some facts. He visited Mad Charlie’s local pubs and wrung a quote from the manager of the London Tavern in Caulfield, where Hegyali was supposedly drinking the night he died: ‘Mate, don’t know him, wouldn’t even know him if he walked in here now – which would be a surprise, seeing he’s dead.’
I dispatched a photographer, who took it upon himself to scale Hegyali’s wall, but he came back with nothing but a mouthful of abuse from the widow. I asked him not to do anything like that again, not least because he might get shot. I was pleased with the way our ‘true-crime’ coverage was going. This was pub talk at its best: Chopper Read, the nation’s most notorious gangster, swaggers into the bar, sits down next to you, leans over and whispers the word about the latest underworld hit.
A year later, when I was editor-in-chief, Ralph interviewed ‘Rocket’ Rod Porter, formerly of the Victorian Police Armed Robbery Squad. In the 1980s, Read had approached Porter with information about various Melbourne drug dealers. Read had hoped to get the same kind of ‘green light’ as Neddy Smith had been given by Roger Rogerson in Sydney. Read told Porter he had shot Sammy Ozerkam, and when Porter realised it was true, he had Read arrested. Read retaliated by signing more than forty statutory declarations accusing Porter and others of major crimes, including supplying the weapon that killed Ozerkam. Porter said Read’s allegations had ruined his career.
Ralph gave Read the right of reply, and his answers gave some indication of how difficult it was – even for Read – to know the truth behind Read’s criminal career. Journalist Dave Lornie asked him if he had been an informant. Read said, ‘Back then I was certifiably insane. I suffered from a psychotic condition, alright? So they had to explain to their superiors what the hell they were doing with a no-eared, 18-and-a-half-stone mental case. . .I was under the wrong impression that these blokes had given me approval to carry out certain actions – this was a figment of my imagination, because I was a mental case.’ He admitted, ‘I did cause Mr Porter a great deal of trouble.’
Read rang me to say if we were going to keep having a go at him, the least we could do is slip him a bit of money. He also sent in some new photographs for us to use the next time we had a go. I gave him a couple of hundred dollars. The movie Chopper was released, with Eric Bana’s flawless Read impersonation, and Read’s bizarre celebrity grew.
The back cover of Chopper 2 features a quote from Rod Porter about the first volume. ‘I enjoyed reading [it],’ he says. ‘I just wish I wasn’t in it.’ I felt the same way when Chopper 9 came out. Read wrote about our evening at the lap-dancing club. He said, ‘Mark Dapin had a good night out at my expense – free food, free booze, and Shane Farmer turned the whole club on for the bloke.’ This was true in a way, if you discount the fact that I had given Read $500. ‘I don’t know what else he got,’ wrote Read, ‘because I left before he did, but the bloke had a good time. If you were the editor of a national men’s magazine and a lap-dancing club owner was doing his best to make you happy, I reckon you’d have a good time, too.’ What would Claire think if she read that?
I did not see Read again until 2003, when he was taking a spoken-word show around Australia’s bloodhouses, clubs and disco pubs. He told all his favourite toecutting tales, and was accompanied by his mate, former AFL hardman Mark ‘Jacko’ Jackson. As part of the program, Read auctioned off collages he had made, showing Read in prison, Read with Eric Bana, Sammy the Turk lying in a pool of his own blood, and Sammy the Turk’s head with a bullet-hole in the middle. He also sold machetes bought from the local hardware shop, and autographed ‘Chopper’.
I was freelancing for The Sydney Morning Herald when I got the chance to interview Read and Jacko, and I asked Read why he had lied that he left me with the strippers in the club. Read had become smoother, and he spoke with greater confidence. His laugh sounded less like a graveside gloat, there was a new warmth in his voice – but he did not like being called a liar.
‘You stayed behind,’ he insisted, ‘with a bong in one hand and a bitch in the other.’
I don’t smoke dope anymore. I’ve been slandered.
‘You have not been slandered,’ said Read. ‘You’re English and you write for newspapers, how can I slander you? You invented the word “slander”.’
Jacko intervened when he could. He said things like, ‘Of course, that was then, this is now.’ Meanwhile, Read warmed to the idea I was born in Britain. ‘I’m glad to see you’ve been standing a bit closer to the shower, too, since last we met,’ he said. ‘You were on the bugle.’ He screwed up his nose. ‘You just got off the plane from England, didn’t you?’
Well, Sydney, actually.
‘You came down here,’ said Read, ‘and found out we had running water and soap. You thought, “Gee, how long’s this been going on?”.’
‘I don’t know whether he likes you or dislikes you,’ said Jacko. ‘I’m really confused.’
So, tell me about Jacko, Chopper.
‘He [Jacko] played the media like a fine violin,’ said Read, ‘as I’ve been doing for the past thirteen years. And you keep falling for it every bloody time, don’t you?’
‘You can’t help yourself,’ said the Marks, in unison.
‘You’re like a dog coming back to revisit its vomit,’ said Read. ‘You’ve got to come back and have another lick at it.’
Okay, Chopper, I’m the dog and you’re the vomit.
‘That’s right, mate,’ said Read, ‘because you don’t clean me up. You revisit the scene of the crime. What’re we going to do later? Take you to a strip club?’
Jacko tried to calm things down, for the third time in five minutes.
‘There’s always a different story,’ he said, good-naturedly, ‘every time [a journalist] comes [to talk to us].’
‘You’ve got what you need,’ said Read to me. ‘Thank God you’ve found employment. Quit while you’re ahead. Be nice . . . One day you may need us. You quite obviously don’t need us now. That’s why you’re being so rude.’
Jacko’s peacemaking attempts were getting a little half-hearted. ‘At least you’re honest,’ he said to me. ‘The fact that you’re cross-eyed, and you could follow your nose to Thredbo . . . Apart from that, I like you. I think you’re a really nice person. And when the push comes to shove, we’re unoffendable.’
‘I don’t think you take offence easily, do you?’ Read asked me.
‘We’re unoffendable,’ said Jacko, this time perhaps encompassing all three of us. ‘Everything’s been said. And if you did write something that was offendable [sic], people would be quite bored with it, because they’ve heard it all before . . . Have you got another question?’
Yeah. Did you scratch his face?
Read had three parallel lines travell
ing like ski tracks down the length of his right cheek.
‘I got scratched by a koala bear at the Healesville Sanctuary,’ said Read.
Really?
‘Most people believe it, when I tell them that,’ said Read.
What was it, then?
‘It’s none of your bloody business what it was.’
Man or woman?
‘It was a barbecue fork,’ said Chopper. ‘Someone’s mother slashed me across the face with a barbecue fork. We were at a barbecue, I endeavoured to pass words with this character, and I picked him up and stuck him headfirst into his own barbecue. His mother attacked me with the bloody fork, so I pulled him out of the barbecue and said, “Sorry”.’
‘Listen,’ said Jacko, ‘we’ve had the best journalists in Australia come 158 sex&money to some of our shows, and they can’t describe what they see. [In fact, no-one on a metropolitan daily had ever reviewed their show.] It’s a brutal, anecdotal comedy night.’
‘True stories,’ said Read to me. ‘Some people find them amusing. Obviously not you. You’ve never had a laugh in your life.’
I gave up.
My brief association with Chopper Read also spoiled my chances with super-model Claudia Schiffer, supposedly. The day I met Schiffer, there was a near-total eclipse of the sun. I suspect, however, the earth did not move for her.
At one of countless ACP meetings, distinguishable one from another only by the number of times people said ‘top of mind’ and whether or not I was told to spend less money on photographs of penguins, Nick announced Claudia Schiffer had agreed to pose for Ralph. One of the sponsors of her Australian tour had dropped out, and ACP had agreed to pick up a quarter of Schiffer’s expenses if she would shoot covers for Cleo, Woman’s Day and Ralph – but she retained the right to change her mind about any of it.
It seemed a strange kind of contract, but supermodels were not exactly hiding in wedding cakes trying to smuggle themselves into my office, so I pretended to believe him, and I nodded and smiled and pencilled myself in to do the interview. I was not certain who Claudia Schiffer might be. I had a vague idea she was married to Richard Gere, and they were both gay. I was told she was, in fact, ‘the face of L’Oreal’, which apparently was some kind of job.
Cleo set up the logistics for the photo shoot, which was to take place in Melbourne. Ralph was allotted one hour of Schiffer’s schedule, while Cleo had three. I was told her hair and make-up would take at least an hour, so I arrived at the studio forty-five minutes early, in the hope of gathering some invaluable behind-the-scenes colour from her no doubt uninhibited banter with the stylist. Although the stylist was there, the photographer, Tim Bauer, was there and the hairdresser was there, the face of L’Oreal was not. The hair-and-make-up hour passed.
Andy Warhol said, ‘Beautiful people are sometimes more prone to keep you waiting . . . because there is a big time differential between beauty and plain,’ so I waited. It looked as though Schiffer’s getting-ready time was going to eat into our shooting time. We reasoned she must be coming straight from another photographer and would probably have her hair done already, and might only need a few touches added to her make-up. Another twenty-five minutes passed. There was no longer enough studio time to do both shoots, even if Schiffer arrived already dressed in her underwear – which seemed unlikely. With twenty minutes of our time to run, the Schiffer entourage strolled into the studio. I introduced myself to Claudia and asked if we could begin the interview immediately. Except she was not Claudia, she was the publicist. Claudia was standing behind her.
Claudia Schiffer did not look like somebody who had been sitting in the make-up chair. She was very tall and slim, but blank-faced and pale, an unremarkable looking Aryan woman with slightly lank hair. (History does not record what she thought of my own battered good looks.)
The real Schiffer had a hasty chat with the stylist, chose a few clothes, and started work on her hair. I asked if I could interview her while she was preparing for the shoot. She said, ‘I’m sorry, I will not be able to hear you over the noise of the hair dryer. We’ll do it after.’ I remember, because those were the only words I ever heard her say.
While I waited for Schiffer’s hair to set, a woman from the PR company that was minding her told me Claudia was having second thoughts about Ralph.
‘But she just said she’d do it,’ I said.
No, the minder told me. Claudia had bought a copy of the magazine and was unimpressed.
I realised I had been stitched up, and I had known it was coming all the time. Clearly, Schiffer had not stopped off at the newsagency to pick up the latest issue of Ralph – which included the Chopper story. The PR company, which had always known what kind of magazine Ralph was, had given her the latest issue and suggested it might not be appropriate. Since there was no time left to do our cover when they arrived, the PR company had probably decided against the shoot long ago – perhaps at the same moment they had agreed to the ‘contract’. I suspect whoever brokered the deal for ACP also knew she would not do it, but Schiffer’s bill had seemed too high if the benefits only flowed to two magazines, so they had pretended they were going to three. That way, Cleo would get its Schiffer shoot, paid for out of a nebulous fund that ACP used to butter up L’Oreal, one of the company’s largest advertisers.
Ralph would be out of pocket for my airfare, the photographer’s fee and the studio hire, so it would look as though I could not balance my budgets, and was spending too much money on photographs of penguins.
A curious charade followed Schiffer’s supposed volte-face. I was asked to courier copies of the last eight Ralphs to somebody in Sydney for a final vetting, even though our studio time had already elapsed. I was told it would – obviously – take a while for them to read through the whole stack, so I walked over the road to a gym and hit a punching bag, imagining the publicist. Suddenly, the gym went black. For an instant, I thought I might have struck the most ignoble moment of my pathetic boxing “career” and actually been knocked out by a punching bag, but it turned out that at 5.40 pm on Tuesday 16 February 1999, there was an eclipse of the sun. I stretched, showered, and returned to the studio. Immediately, I was told Claudia had said no.
Back in my office the next day, I received a message to call Ros Reines at the Daily Telegraph – somebody else I had never heard of. I rang her back, and she turned out to be a gossip columnist. ‘Thisss isss Rosss Reinesss,’ hissed a partly human-sounding voice. ‘Isss it true that Claudia Ssschiffer refused to ssshoot for Ralph because of a ssstory about Chopper Read in a lap-dancing club?’
‘No, it isn’t,’ I said, adding quickly, ‘and anyway, I, er . . . can’t talk about it because we’re suing L’Oreal.’
I was hoping she might think the matter was sub judice. I rang Nick and asked if there was any chance we might sue L’Oreal. I called back Rosss Reinesss, but she did not answer her phone. I left a message saying I had got the story wrong, we were not suing, and she could call me for clarification. She never replied, but she ran the story of our calls in her newspaper the next day. I cannot complain, I suppose. It is the only time my name will ever be linked with a supermodel’s in a gossip column.
I wasted several hours of my time trying to bill Ralph’s expenses to the L’Oreal slush fund, but I had no joy. The farce went on for a further couple of months, as Nick had got hold of a t-shirt Schiffer had worn, and he felt we ought to auction it in the magazine. I only had four objections to this: (1) I never wanted to see Schiffer’s name in my magazine (possibly the only thing she and I had in common); (2) It was more tasteless than a night out at a Tasmanian lap-dancing club with Chopper Read; (3) Nobody would enter the contest, anyway; (4) Fuck off.
Somebody mislaid the t-shirt, and a few more meetings were blighted by Nick’s (finally successful) attempts to get it back if we ‘weren’t going to use it’.
My biggest non-celebrity problem was ACP New Zealand. FHM sold 10 000 copies in New Zealand. When I started, Ralph only sent over 3000. At the tim
e, New Zealand copies were officially included in the audit, and therefore taken into account by Australian advertisers. The first issue of Ralph did not go to New Zealand. Subsequent issues sold less than 2000 copies out of 10 000 distributed, and ACP did not even bother distributing issue six.
Nick used to be CEO of ACP New Zealand, and he knew the market. He said we were second best because New Zealanders preferred anything British to anything Australian. I figured if we gave them something Kiwi, they might like that even better, and decided to boost the New Zealand content and increase the number of copies that crossed the Tasman.
I encountered massive, determined resistance. I did not understand the New Zealand market, I was told. It was different from Australia, different from anywhere else in the world. Magazines were not even sold in newsagencies, they were sold in dairies, and dairies were not even dairies, they were greengrocers, and greengrocers did not like to take more magazines than they could sell because it meant they had less room for kiwifruit or whatever.
I flew to New Zealand, to see for myself this unique society, so similar yet so different from every other in the English-speaking world. One block from my hotel was a shop that looked very much like a newsagency. The proprietor had a big stack of FHMs, and FHM posters on his walls, but no Ralphs. I asked him why he was out of Ralphs. He said the distributors would not give him enough of them. I found other newsagencies, and a chain of bookshops with shelves stacked with magazines. Auckland, the largest magazine market in the country, seemed surprisingly similar to Sydney or London.
I met a manager in New Zealand who told me he loved my magazine. There are Ten Immutable Rules of Publishing. Rule Number Eight is: In Publishing As In Life, When People Say ‘I Love You’, It Means They Want To Fuck You. He listened to my complaints, told me I was mistaken, politely promised nothing and subsequently did nothing.
When the 1998 audit figures were released, FHM outsold Ralph by 63 936 to 60 149, entirely due to FHM’s domination of New Zealand. This enabled them to say they were the best-selling men’s magazine, and was worth tens of thousands of dollars in advertising revenue and publicity.
