Blonde Ambition

  MacSween and Roxy clashed again in the second episode—‘She’s a monster and she’s power crazy,’ MacSween said, pulling no punches. ‘She’s very controlling and she loves the sound of her own voice.’ Dancer Kym Johnson concurred. She found Roxy’s ‘shut up … and listen’ motivational speech to the women’s team shocking. She described Roxy as ‘rude’ and ‘tough’. The men, too, had problems with her. Dermott Brereton would describe her as ‘a rabid dog with a bone’.

  By week three, Stephanie Rice emerged as Roxy’s main rival. Rice would describe Roxy as ‘forceful’ and the battle between the two women would escalate and become the personality clash of the season. It was precisely what television bosses were hoping. The fight would bring Rice to tears—just as Roxy’s clash with MacSween produced tears of frustration from MacSween and one brief weepy moment on camera from Roxy—but importantly it would give the television network a villainess to promote in its advertising. This would help lift the show’s ratings and propel it into the top ten programs on Australian television in its first weeks on air. The show’s publicist had his work done for him, thanks largely to Roxy.

  The free-to-air ratings ultimately wouldn’t last. They would recede along with the women’s forbearance of one another. The psychological warfare started to take its toll on everyone. A fierce Roxy complained she wasn’t being treated with enough respect, argued she wasn’t listened to, called her Supreme teammates ‘condescending’ and sundry other names—all of which Rice would say could reasonably be said of Roxy herself. Roxy threatened to pull the pin on the show, though she did not take a backward step. The feud between the women went to the wire in the final episode of the season—which Rice would win.

  While Nine’s viewers didn’t warm to Roxy, behind the scenes one television publicist working on the show did. Nine Network publicist David Brown would describe Roxy as a ‘publicist’s dream’. Brown explained that Roxy knew the ins and outs of publicity so understood what he needed from her and gave ‘one thousand per cent’ when required to promote the show. Roxy’s eye for detail and commitment to the program was apparent during the filming of the show’s promo, which called for Roxy to arrive in a Ferrari and climb out looking like a glamorous socialite. Brown recounted:

  From memory we decided we would shoot Roxy arriving in a Ferrari and we were sourcing a Ferrari for the shoot. Roxy was to turn up looking fabulous but then she always did. She turned up on the day looking a million dollars with her trademark Birkin handbag on her arm only to find—shockingly—that the handbag didn’t match the Ferrari. I can’t quite remember if it was a blue Birkin or a white one but she immediately had her assistant sent off home to get another Birkin—one that would match the Ferrari. In fact I’m not sure we didn’t use her Ferrari in the end anyway—a white Ferrari—to match her favourite white Birkin.

  The camera crew came to realise Roxy was always ready for her close-up.

  If we arrived at 7.30 a.m. to collect her and take her to the airport for a trip to Melbourne—a place she said she’d never been to before surprisingly—she would have had the professional make-up artist and hair stylist over to her house making her up from 6. I wouldn’t be surprised if Roxy started every day with a visit from a make-up artist and a professional blow-dry. When she slept I’ll never know.

  The immaculately groomed Roxy did in fact prefer to use her own style team over the Nine Network’s seasoned experts.

  When it came to doing interviews to promote her appearance on the show, Brown said Roxy delivered. ‘She delivered in spades. Again and again and again.’

  If I set up twenty or forty radio interviews a day, she’d do them all, uncomplaining. Of course, her slamming Steph over and over worked well for the show’s promotions. We went to Melbourne at one point and the Melbourne press asked me would Roxy mind speaking about the clash with Steph Rice. I said ‘Oh darl, she sooo won’t mind a bit!’ She would slam Steph in interviews twenty times a day. She’d do it at 8.05 a.m. on the Kyle and Jackie O 2DayFM radio show and then she’d do it again at 8.40 on Fitzy and Wippa’s Nova radio show.

  While Roxy wasn’t holding back, Steph wasn’t doing the same thing though. Because they’d been separated she wasn’t really in the fight. Eventually they couldn’t be in the same room together. They would only come together to shoot scenes and that’s when there’d be tears from Steph and walkouts from Roxy—on camera.

  Brown, who has worked in and around television as a journalist and publicist for thirty years, couldn’t be certain but sensed Roxy came close to winning the show: ‘I think someone may have said “Look, you can’t have a Sydney PR win—no-one in the other states will know her—the Olympian should win”.’ And the Olympian did win—‘though Roxy was great at fundraising’.

  Throughout the 3-month production shoot—in which there were plenty of long days that started at 4 a.m. and wrapped at 11.30 p.m.—the indefatigable Roxy was running her Sweaty Betty business from her phone on the program set. The finance heavyweight who founded Wizard Home Loans and Yellow Brick Road wealth management company, Mark Bouris, the Apprentice’s boss, looked, some observed, ‘totally in awe’ of Roxy. ‘There was a touch of the proud father about him. It seemed he saw something of himself in her,’ Brown said.

  Bouris would offer Roxy some sound business advice during their three months together on The Celebrity Apprentice. He suggested she change the way she spoke to people and stop starting her conversations with ‘I’ll tell you the truth’, because it made him believe she wasn’t always telling the truth.

  While Roxy was being cut down to size during the making of the reality show—and cutting others down into the bargain—she would be away from Pixie, then five months of age, for up to twelve hours a day. Roxy had installed a trusted team, led by Curtis, to look after her daughter.

  Pixie adored her father. Three years later, Roxy would say in her letter to the court that when it came to Curtis and their children, ‘No-one else matters—not even me’.

  One who glimpsed Roxy’s domestic life during this period reported that at seven in the morning, Roxy would kiss Pixie goodbye as she lay in her father’s arms and head off to her television job without displaying any outward signs of separation anxiety.

  ‘This baby at dawn was, like her mother, also immaculate—not like babies are at dawn,’ a television insider would recall. Even with the early starts, Roxy would find time to coordinate Pixie’s accessories before heading to the television studio at dawn.

  As a result of The Celebrity Apprentice, Roxy was suddenly famous. She could cross it off her to-do list. Though public relations had helped her forge valuable and influential connections, and her feud with Ruby had brought notoriety, The Celebrity Apprentice brought 9-carat fame and a national profile. She would act fast to capitalise on it. Within a 6-week period she opened Pixie’s Instagram account, fell pregnant with her second child and registered her new blogging business, The Ministry of Talent.

  Within weeks it would be revealed Roxy had been in secret talks for months to sell Sweaty Betty. In July, the 33-year-old would confirm industry chatter—she was talking to prospective buyers from key marketing companies and investors about selling her PR business. Her young family, she would say, prompted her to re-evaluate her career. Her appearance on The Celebrity Apprentice provided a rare chance to expose the Sweaty Betty brand nationally. This might boost the company’s value.

  ‘The business has grown exponentially since I started it in 2004 with no formal PR experience,’ she told The Daily Telegraph.

  Australia’s marketing sector was astonished to hear Roxy was rumoured to want $10 million for the agency. It was a figure many believed she had plucked out of thin air—something ‘nice, fat and round’—as there was no property attached to the agency and client numbers, across the industry, were in a state of flux thanks to the economic downturn and a proliferation of new PR agencies. It seemed pretty much anyone thought they could run one.

  She would tell marketing and medi
a website Mumbrella her client numbers were at eighty—down from the heady days of 120-plus or 150. Roxy hoped to sell 100 per cent of the business and stay on as a director on a salary, but it wouldn’t eventuate. Her timing, for a change, was off.

  She had not been helped by Curtis’s insider trading allegations and would acknowledge the impact his trial was having on Sweaty Betty in her letter to the Supreme Court: ‘I have lost some prospective clients and will continue to do so.’

  Her husband’s possible jailing, she added, would force her to ‘reconsider my current clients’, which included Harris Scarfe, Katies, Witchery, Cotton On and Windsor Smith.

  News of her unsuccessful bid to sell the agency coincided with the listing that same month of Roxy’s investment property in Nelson Street, Woollahra.

  Off the back of her appearance on The Celebrity Apprentice she had hopes of selling the tidy 2-bedroom, 2-bathroom home for $3.5 million. Once again, her timing, or her market valuation, was off—the house she bought in 2006 for $2 791 000 would sell in September 2013 for $2 630 000—a loss of $161 000. An unimaginable thing in Sydney’s property market.

  Had rumours the couple were simultaneously trying to off-load their Woollahra home come to fruition, some might have believed the couple was having a fire sale. Roxy had moved quickly to scotch talk the family home in Edward Street was on the market.

  ‘I have my investment property at Woollahra going to auction next week as I am looking to purchase a commercial property in favour of residential now that I have a marital home with my husband and daughter,’ she told The Daily Telegraph.

  Weeks later, as promised, she would ‘up the ante’ and buy a commercial block in the still-swish suburb of Paddington. She had plans to move her businesses Sweaty Betty and The Ministry of Talent into the 250-square-metre Elizabeth Street property which, though a third the size of the Beaconsfield showroom where she was currently installed, was in one of her favourite suburbs. She had sold her handmade diamante belts there in her teens and worked as a ‘door bitch’ up the road. A return to Paddington would be like coming home. She bought the building, with thirteen large rooms, two kitchenettes, a main bathroom and a private internal courtyard garden, in her own name for $2.66 million.

  Roxy was planning to quit her parents’ Beaconsfield complex but would put her relocation plans to Paddington on hold and instead start extensive renovations at the new Paddington property. The release of Roxy’s book, Strictly Confidential, in January 2012 had brought her a measure of recognition as a writer and rallied a small cheer squad of new fans who were eager to follow in her PR footsteps.

  Two weeks after announcing in OK! magazine that she was expecting her second child in the spring of 2013, Roxy would release a sequel called The Rumour Mill. Sources said the roman à clef was ghostwritten by The Sunday Telegraph’s gossip maven Ros Reines.

  ‘Roxy would record her thoughts for characters and plotlines most days and then bundle up the notes and jottings and send them off to Reines at home to be worked into a manuscript,’ said one close observer of Roxy’s creative process.

  Reines, a friend to both Roxy and her mother Doreen, would never betray a confidence and denied ghostwriting the book, though there was a character in the Jazzy Lou books created in homage to Reines, gossip columnist Pamela Stone, who, like Reines, called everyone ‘doll’ and Reines admitted ‘sounds alarmingly like me’.

  The Rumour Mill had its launch at the Sydney celebrity hotspot Otto Ristorante, Woolloomooloo Wharf, on 19 November 2013—the day Roxy’s husband was committed to stand trial in the NSW Supreme Court for insider trading. The clash of dates, some postured, could hardly be a coincidence.

  Killing two birds with one stone, newly pregnant Roxy would address questions about both her new book and the ‘great husband’ who ‘inspired’ her, though he was across town at Downing Centre Court.

  ‘He is much younger than me and his work ethic and how smart he is just blows my mind every day,’ AAP reported Roxy saying. ‘I don’t even think anything about [the court case] … In my eyes the court will do what needs to be done, and he’s got my support.’

  ‘He is one of the most inspirational people I’ve ever met.’

  She promised a third book—an autobiography—would follow The Rumour Mill: ‘So much has happened throughout the last three years from a family perspective, and so that’s where it’s at, an autobiography.’

  A third book did follow in 2014. The Spotlight, the latest installation in the Jazzy Lou PR adventure series, was not in any traditional sense an autobiography. It was more chick lit ‘fiction’ heavily inspired by Roxy’s own life but terrific for disseminating the Roxy myth, something she was very much invested in. The promotional material for the book teased the reader with the promise the tome’s central character was planning to reinvent the game.

  Having shed half of her Sweaty Betty clientele by the first half of 2014, Roxy would focus on fine-tuning her newest venture, The Ministry of Talent. There would be a frantic burst of activity: she would trademark Pixie’s Bows in April and welcome a new baby in May. The bloggers’ bureau was her ‘next big thing’, she would excitedly tell website The Devil Blogs Prada.

  The creation of The Ministry of Talent coincided with Roxy’s latest review of her PR business. ‘Consolidation,’ she said, was necessary because The Ministry of Talent was ‘growing exponentially’. Dozens of her PR clients—she wouldn’t reveal which ones—had been given notice and told to find other agencies, she said.

  ‘Consolidation is vital to ensure our level of service to clients on the Sweaty Betty PR side is maintained whilst growth opportunities are maximised for my newest venture,’ Roxy told Mumbrella in 2014—a year after telling the same website Sweaty Betty had 80 clients.

  If you are able to stop work on 40 brands and reduce your portfolio from 80 to 40 clearly there is no downturn—you’re going from strength to strength aren’t you? If there was a downturn you would be clinging to those for life wouldn’t you? Consolidation is because there is one of me, I want to manage two successful businesses.

  She also planned to concentrate on her family.

  The Ministry of Talent would be representing forty clients—bloggers and creatives, including Pixie—she hinted. The PR entrepreneur believed social media and blog commentary and endorsement were evolving into new media’s ‘rivers of gold’—an expression famously used in the decades prior to describe the once lucrative classified ad sections of newspapers.

  Roxy was now on a recruitment drive for high-profile key influencers and bloggers who could drive brand awareness for fashion, beauty, lifestyle, food, fitness and other clients. ‘Brand awareness’ was not a new concept but of late mavericks at the forefront of social media’s marketing revolution had been pushing the boundaries and definitions of advertising. Nobody used the word ‘advertising’ on the new social media frontier. It was decidedly uncool in the hip new marketing landscape.

  In its first year, The Ministry of Talent signed popular fashion blogger duo Elle Ferguson and Tash Sefton from They All Hate Us, Antoinette Marie of Sydney Fashion Blogger, Sarah Jane Young behind the blog She Is Sarah Jane, stylist and designer Pip Edwards, Bianca Cheah of Sporteluxe, Big Brother housemate Tully Smyth, high-profile make-up artist Max May and a slate of ‘creatives’ from beauty and lifestyle industries. Driven by her quest to be a market leader, Roxy believed that in managing bloggers she had found a niche through which to break new marketing ground.

  ‘There isn’t a set standard we look to,’ she would say. ‘Your job is to find the most suitable talent for the client—talent you know can deliver on the requirements and give the best possible cut-through on the job.’

  If popular bloggers were the new face of marketing, that would only be good news for Pixie and Roxy.

  Roxy was by now thoroughly obsessed with social media. While she had taken three years to embrace Twitter—the Sweaty Betty Twitter account was activated in 2009; the microblogging app was launched in March
2006—by 2012 she was an enthusiastic member of the Twitter, Facebook and Instagram communities.

  She created her @SweatyBettyPR Instagram account in 2012 and the app had become indispensable to her and would change the way she did business. ‘I’m a proficient Instagrammer but I’m shit at everything else,’ she would tell The Sydney Morning Herald. Instagram was the perfect accessory to Roxy’s business. It was visual, fast, controllable, promised much—and was free.

  By 2012, Roxy had pressed her Sweaty Betty force into action. The Bettys were urged to post, blog, tweet, photograph and ’gram everything they saw that might promote a brand’s image. To Roxy’s mind she was now running the art department of a magazine. She loved photography, flowers, design and small sharp details. This new playing field felt like it was made for her.

  Initially the PR team had used Instagram to post product shots, events, celebrities, her book covers, the Bettys, food, flowers and Roxy’s cars, but following Roxy’s appearance on The Celebrity Apprentice, the number of photographs of Roxy would increase. The community demanded it with their ‘likes’ after all. Negative feedback and comments were routinely deleted. This was Roxy’s ‘happy place’. She was the traffic controller of this space.

  Conscious of the association of her new celebrity image with her company’s brand, Roxy was polishing her visage with the help of a wardrobe stylist. After seeing what Harper’s and Vogue Australia’s fashion editor Christine Centenera had done for Lara Bingle, Roxy had turned to Centenera to inject some European chic into her own wardrobe. She would list her wardrobe staples in 2013 as Balmain, Celine, Givenchy and Levi’s. She would later throw some Australian designers into the mix with Scanlan & Theodore and Josh Goot. Roxy had a Balmain jacket in every shade and her love affair with Hermès Birkin handbags was verging on monomania. It was rumoured she had twelve of them, which could equate to a $100 000-plus collection.