Blonde Ambition

  Her critics believed Roxy had done it to conceal the fact Sweaty Betty PR had a high volume of smaller ‘bread and butter’ clients and fewer lucrative international marquee brands than some top agencies. If Roxy’s brands list was undisclosed, prospective clients shopping for an agency online couldn’t compare her clients to those of a more prestigious agency—one like EVH.

  EVH, run by Emma van Haandel, the daughter of Melbourne restaurateurs John and Lisa van Haandel, had established her PR agency in January 2004—six months before Roxy. EVH described itself online as ‘Australia’s leading luxury communications and events agency’ and represented brands such as Ellery, Max Mara, Coach, Christopher Esber, Alex Perry, Moët and Fendi—all listed transparently on its website. With that list, EVH could legitimately join a tiny handful of other agencies making the ‘leading luxury agency’ claim.

  Van Haandel was on Roxy’s ‘watch’ list. Departed Bettys said Roxy was ‘obsessed’ with her success and her business model. More PR agencies were opening all the time—there were upwards of 300 listed in Sydney’s Yellow Pages—and Roxy had sharpened her instincts to protect what she’d built with guts and sweat.

  Her father had taught her to ‘take no prisoners’ in business and she was taking none. She wouldn’t give a rival an inch but she would continue to adapt. Roxy had always been a master of adaptation.

  In tandem with the evolution of her business had come the inevitable and ongoing evolution of Roxy the fashionista. She had developed a keen interest in fashion as a child, and had been influenced, like much of her generation, by Hollywood stars in her teens until, by the time she was working at McDonald’s, she was dressing ‘like I was about to rob a bank’ in ‘dreadful snap pants trend … a men’s oversize t-shirt and a pair of joggers’, she recounted to Redcliffe Style.

  While working with Diesel she started to refine her look in line with the European jeans brand. By the time she had signed the streetwear label Converse and later Levi’s at Sweaty Betty, Roxy had put her ‘bank robber’ days behind her. Her ‘so Sydney’ spaghetti-strap sundresses had also largely been consigned to the back of the wardrobe. She cultivated a youthful utilitarian look that gave her licence to embrace the rebel street-style fashions associated with her clients. Image-wise, this worked well for Roxy. Not only did it differentiate her from the legion of pretty PRs in stilettos, it also meant some of the cool factor associated with these brands started to rub off on her in a business sense in the years from 2006 to 2011. After years of being a small player on the PR landscape, Sweaty Betty PR was cool.

  In Australia, fashion didn’t come much cooler than Sass & Bide at that time. Though she was unable to entice them onto her books as a client, Roxy would take a major style cue from Sass & Bide designers Heidi Middleton and Sarah-Jane Clarke. The label’s ruched black ‘Rats’ pants became synonymous with Roxy’s revamped business uniform in the late noughties.

  Photos of Roxy in the newspaper social pages revealed her to be an original in a sea of spray-tanned slip-dress-clad swimsuit models and Miss Australia veterans. As she approached the age of thirty, Roxy’s slightly androgynous, combat-business style—coupled with her unconventional looks—made her stand out. She was wiry, sharp and unique—something that resonated with the millennial generation.

  Two indispensable accessories hinted that Roxy’s fashion evolution was ongoing. A beloved Goyard handbag in Jamaican colours with large initials ‘R J’ struck some as being a ‘bit woggy’—Roxy would later dispense with it and amass the enviable designer bag collection that would one day have its own softly lit glass showcase in her enormous walk-in wardrobe.

  A passion for Chanel ballet flats turned into an obsession and signposted a developing fascination with European brands. Roxy later admitted she owned $700 Chanel ballet flats ‘in every colour known to man’. ‘Every time I walk into the shop, they think, “She’s here for another pair of the same bloody shoes. Can’t she mix it up a bit?”’ she would tell Fairfax Media. She liked them, she said, because she could run in them—literally, because she rarely walked anywhere.

  Roxy’s emergence as a fashionista made her a natural fit for young women’s lifestyle magazines. Cleo and Cosmopolitan magazines did not have the influence Vogue Australia and Harper’s Bazaar did but as established and successful Australian brands, they were good clients for Roxy to win. Sweaty Betty would be retained by them both.

  The success of the Sweaty Betty–organised Cleo Swimsuit Party in 2010—a flamenco-themed affair at Sydney CBD nightclub Ivy—prompted the magazine to retain her services again the following year for its Cleo Bachelor of the Year finalist announcement. The repeat business helped her land, in July 2011, an event with the magazine’s main rival, Cosmopolitan.

  The Cosmopolitan Fun Fearless Females Awards would be held just weeks before she was due to give birth but that wasn’t a problem. Roxy had contingency plans in place for the birth of her baby.

  Pixie Rose Curtis was born via caesarean section at Prince of Wales Private Hospital in Sydney’s eastern suburbs following a textbook pregnancy that Roxy managed to keep from many clients. She would later reveal she had assiduously disguised her ‘bump’ so her clients wouldn’t detect her gestational state—her way of demonstrating to them that nothing had changed or would change in respect to their business.

  The news of Pixie’s birth received only cursory mention in the mainstream media in August 2011.

  ‘Like most new mothers the day I gave birth to my beautiful daughter Pixie Rose on Tuesday, August 16 at 2pm is one I’ll treasure forever,’ she would tell Grazia magazine in the months after, acknowledging the emotional impact of welcoming her first child with Curtis. ‘An overwhelming sense of contentment washed over me as I held her in my arms for the very first time, marvelling at her tiny hands and downy hair.’

  The ‘marvelling’ on the day of her daughter’s birth lasted until 5 p.m.—about three hours—after which the workaholic shook off the heady effects of her spinal anaesthetic and was able to locate her phone in order to resume her primary task—peppering her staff at Sweaty Betty with instructions.

  Curtis, she said, had insisted she put her phone down on her way into surgery: ‘When I was still sending emails from my BlackBerry as I was wheeled into the operating room he finally put his foot down and said “Stop. Enough!”’

  After the birth, she went straight back to work. ‘I couldn’t physically go into the office, I was hooked up to pain relief and a catheter in hospital after a caesarean section, but my hand still worked and my BlackBerry was attached to it firing off work emails to my staff,’ she said, reasserting her commitment to her career.

  Hoping to inspire like-minded career women, Roxy was adamant she would not let motherhood slow her down. Baby Pixie Rose—whose initials were unintended, she said—was simply going to have to keep up with her. Roxy knew that in her clients’ eyes, she was the business; they retained Sweaty Betty to work with her personally. She would remain at her station driving their campaigns lest another agency would do as she herself had done by turning prospector and trying to slide under her defences.

  Her maternity leave lasted, she would say, only four days. Pixie was born on a Tuesday and by the following Monday, Roxy was back at the office working on the forthcoming BRW magazine Young Rich List announcement reception which was to be held in four weeks.

  Pixie would be bottle-fed: ‘I haven’t been able to breastfeed because it’s not professional in my work environment. To have Pixie at work and around clients is one thing given I’m feeding her with a bottle, but I think it would be a different story if I whipped my boob out.’

  Despite the pressures of keeping 100 or 120 or 150 clients happy, as well as her 25-odd employees productively engaged, the PR consultant insisted she had no regrets about not taking time off to nest at home with her newborn daughter. Pixie would come to work with Roxy instead, she informed Grazia’s readers: ‘Pix and I arrive at the office at 8.30am and leave at 5pm so I can be home to b
ath her and put her to bed, even if I have to nip out to a function afterwards.’

  ‘I honestly think being at home every day would send me mad! I love my job too much and I thrive on the fast paced environment. I feel I’m a much better mother for having a good work/life balance.’

  But the infant wasn’t spending the planned time at the Beaconsfield office. Like other wealthy women, Roxy could afford to hire a nanny and she had retained two to care for her baby around-the-clock at home. Having spent a small fortune converting a space within her parents’ Beaconsfield commercial building into a nursery newly furnished with the most luxurious baby accessories on the market, the 31-year-old new mum would eventually find it easier to leave Pixie at home. She confirmed she had retained a ‘night nurse’—‘so that I can get some sleep as I know I couldn’t do my job … without it … Four hours a night is all I need anyway,’ she said, repeating her devotional mantra.

  Roxy and Curtis had taken Pixie home to their new house at 50 Edward Street, Woollahra—a property bought in March 2011 for $6.6 million before spending another bundle gutting and renovating the home with the aid of society interior designer Blainey North. They were now sharing the 4-bedroom and 3-bathroom house with Roxy’s own childhood nanny Louisa Moreno, who lived with Roxy’s mother Doreen and performed housekeeping duties. By night, the trusted Moreno would attend the baby if she woke.

  There would be a roster of other nannies going in and out of Pixie’s life. A Filipina worked for a term as the day nanny but didn’t last long. When she finished up, Roxy half-joked the woman’s departure was a positive thing as Pixie was starting to ‘talk funny’.

  In a rare insight into Roxy’s new ‘work–life balance’, the family’s reliance on nannies would be raised in Roxy’s character reference for Curtis to the Supreme Court. In the 3-page letter (published widely by the media) she acknowledged her husband was ‘primary carer’ to the couple’s children—Pixie, by then, having been joined by a baby brother, Hunter, born in 2014.

  ‘We’ve … worked hard to make sure they have a parent in their lives as much as is possible, rather than them having extended time with carers, despite our busy work life,’ she wrote. ‘Oli and I have worked … to make sure that the child care arrangements we have in place are long-lasting—so that Pixie and Hunter do not have too many people come and go in their lives.’

  Instagram showed a happy family enjoying wonderful holidays and beach outings—lots of smiles and snacks and clothing and donuts and toys and attentive Bettys at play with Pixie. A nanny would also travel with the family when they went on luxury holidays overseas, ‘so that I can continue to work remotely and so that Oli can have a break,’ she would explain in her 2016 character reference to the Supreme Court.

  Roxy’s appeal failed to move the court. Curtis would still go to jail.

  Roxy said she was managing the daily juggle—it was an experience she would tackle as she did everything, with precision. The trick to managing business and motherhood in unison was ‘not to think about it and spend your time making a to do list … just to juggle it all, reduce the amount of sleep you’re used to and think of it all as a wonderful opportunity that you just need to manage. For me I don’t worry about being overwhelmed—in fact I don’t think I have ever been,’ she would tell Playroom to Boardroom website.

  With two nannies, her mother Doreen and husband Curtis, when he wasn’t away travelling for week-long stretches for Riverstone Advisory, playing supporting roles, Roxy found she had the support she needed on the home front. Pixie was in good hands.

  The Sweaty Betty PR force meanwhile was focused on their objectives for spring 2011 when Roxy, having thrown herself headlong back into her work less than a week after her caesarean surgery, arrived at her office one day to be met by horrified stares from her staff. Their famously fanatically tidy boss was ‘drenched’ in blood. The manic, insuppressible Roxy had opened her surgical wound and failed to notice in her haste to get to the office. It wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last that Roxy failed to heed a doctor or surgeon’s advice concerning her health. Unwilling or unable to take the recommended 6-week period to recover from her caesarean, she had compromised her recovery. It wasn’t entirely her fault.

  In the carpark of the Sweaty Betty HQ, on its haunches, sat the $320 000 status symbol suspected of playing a role in Roxy’s latest drama—the low-mounted Aston Martin V8 Vantage she had been thundering around Sydney in since Pixie’s birth. While the Aston’s much-celebrated zero-to-100-kilometres-per-hour-in-4.8-seconds acceleration and 6- or 7-speed gearbox conspired to produce a gutsy on-road performance, the car’s tricky gear shifts hadn’t yet been rated by obstetric surgeons for C-section patients. Joyously wrenching the shift and riding the accelerator as she navigated the potholes of Sydney’s bitumen had come at a price, said a former associate.

  Passengers in Roxy’s Aston recalled it was always a memorably bumpy and jerky trip.

  Curtis hadn’t been able to tear his eyes away from his newborn daughter in the hours after her birth. The new father had fallen ‘instantly in love’ with Pixie. He would soon, Roxy would tell the court, be the baby’s primary carer: ‘He’s fun, tolerant, uncomplaining and loving,’ Roxy said of her husband’s parenting style in the generous character reference. ‘I am often unable to be relied upon to be home at a regular time to do these things due to the nature of my work,’ she would write.

  As Pixie grew, Roxy’s husband would increasingly manage the dinners, the bedtimes and bath times. She openly admitted the pair ‘squabbled’ over parenting matters, like other new parents: putting a pram together had tested them, as did establishing the rules—the ‘rights and wrongs’ as she called them—of teaching children and raising them. One unique subject that divided the couple was Roxy’s enthusiasm for social media and her decision to set up a blog for her daughter, pixie-pix, on Tumblr in her first year. She would openly acknowledge the couple’s differing view on the subject to friends and family. In her second year, Roxy propelled the tot, then an oblivious 22-month-old, onto Instagram. In her book The Spotlight, released in November 2014 and based on her life, Roxy would write PR boss Jazzy Lou, a character so like Roxy it was hard to tell them apart, was slammed by her husband for her failure to consult him on their daughter’s social media stardom.

  Roxy had been active on Instagram since 2012. She and members of her young staff were caretakers of the @SweatyBettyPR account and vigilantly uploaded photographs of flowers, shoes, client events, food, lithe bodies, aspirational slogans like ‘Hell yeah’ and ‘Your dream does not exist—You must create it’, Sydney Harbour views and client product to the account to generate ‘likes’ for her clients, one of the tenuous goals of ecommerce marketing.

  In June 2013, Pixie’s account, @pixiecurtis, was created. Roxy would open the account the same month she concluded her run on The Celebrity Apprentice—a stint that elevated her to national celebrity status but also saw her dubbed television’s ‘villain of the year’ by entertainment websites.

  The first image on Pixie’s account was a blurry shot of a titian-headed tot excitedly clutching brightly packaged toiletry products in both hands: ‘Hey #babblebox [sic]—thanks so much for sending me some presents—I am right into lotions and potions … They keep me looking #youthful x.’ The post received over a hundred ‘likes’.

  The post was of product sent from Babbleboxx, a marketing company specialising in the distribution of consumer products to ‘heavyweight influencers who are guaranteed to post, pin, snap, tweet and share your message across Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram … social drivers with tremendous authority—inspiring and engaging their numerous fans to create unprecedented brand exposure’.

  With that one post, Pixie had arrived. According to the Babbleboxx criteria, she was now a ‘heavyweight influencer’ of online marketing. Within a week, a sudden flurry of posts confirmed Pixie’s fast-growing attachment to Instagram. In twenty or so posts, Pixie affirmed she was so
cial media’s newest untoilet-trained cash-for-comment tout.

  ‘We would love to send Pixie some product from our store @sweatybettypr @pixiecurtis www.minibots.com.au xx’ messaged Minibots.com, the distributor of international designer baby clothing, toys and accessories, to Pixie’s page. The response was immediate and enthusiastic: ‘That’s so kind! My email is [email protected] xxP’ replied the @pixiecurtis account curator.

  Within days came a post showing Pixie pulling on some tiny sandals: ‘Thanks @minibots for the delivery today—you are officially my fav new online store! These sandals are a #summerstaple xx’.

  A photo of Pixie in a bath surrounded by Disney product created a toddler-sized dilemma: ‘Thanks #disney #mcphersonslimited for the new bubble bath—hmm which to pick!!!!’

  A plush robot toy would bring delight: ‘#musthave at the moment is @planetzimmi—if you don’t have one to play with—mention it to your family! You need it right away! #advanced learning www.planetzimmi.com’.

  An image of Pixie opening a branded shopping bag from an upmarket baby boutique catering to Sydney’s richest and most famous new mothers sounded like it had been written by an advertising copywriter: ‘Love a surprise from my friend #terryberry at #adrienneandmissesbonney in #doublebay—if you are looking for the ultimate in baby gifts—this is THE destination xxxP’.

  In her first week on Instagram, Pixie had acknowledged receipt of some twenty gift packages. Her mother would see off criticism that she was soliciting freebies on behalf of her daughter stating, in March 2014, that Pixie’s posts were ‘clearly transparent with a sponsored post notation and the company whom has sponsored the mentions’.