by Mia Freedman
Ironically, years later, Kerry would do a deal with Fairfax and Hearst to buy all their titles, including Dolly and Cosmo. The editor of Cosmo at the time of this transition from Fairfax to ACP was Pat Ingram, who would continue to edit Cosmo until she was ready to hand over the mantle to someone else. And chose me.
So that’s how one company came to have two virtually identical magazines aimed at the same market, competing for the same readers and ad dollars. And that’s how ACP came to control the young women’s lifestyle market with the two dominant players.
Externally, this has been smart and profitable. Internally, it’s been a little more complex. Cosmo and Cleo are like two intensely competitive siblings. They compete not only for readers and ad pages but also for the love and attention of their parents, I mean management.
Basically, each magazine has always been convinced the other had it easier. There was much mutual paranoia that the rival was getting preferential treatment, a better deal.
Over the years, management has played the role of patient parent, defusing squabbles and occasionally sending someone to their room for time out when things became too heated. In truth, the overall effect of such intense internal competition has been extremely good for business with each trying to outdo the other to prove that they are the better magazine.
Every few years another title would launch into the market—most notably B magazine in 1998—but they never lasted long. Cosmo and Cleo were iconic brands and squashed competition very quickly.
After buying Cosmo, the first and smartest thing Kerry did was change the on-sale date of Cosmo, separating it from Cleo by two weeks.
This instantly spiked Cosmo’s sales because many women suddenly started buying both, almost as a fortnightly ‘Closmo‘.
Before I began working for ACP, I was one of those women. But like most readers of both mags, I always identified more strongly with one. In my case, Cleo. It was more Australian and less sophisticated. I found Cosmo a bit remote. A bit harder to relate to. I was more of a beach than a cocktail bar. I was more of a cossie than a little black dress. And Cleo had Lisa, my idol, who I’d followed from Dolly like a loyal puppy. That sealed the deal and made my preference a no-brainer.
Ironically, I think my passionate devotion to Cleo and Lisa would have made me a lousy Cleo editor. I was too close to it. Conversely, my feelings about Cosmo had been ambivalent at best. As a reader, it had been a mag I bought but didn’t love. As a Cleo staffer, it had been the enemy. Now, my allegiances had had to shift and Cosmo had become my passion.
A SLUMBER PARTY WITH SEX TIPS
Fax to me from Hearst:
‘Dear Editors, we can’t wait to see you all in Amsterdam next month. The itinerary for the conference is attached and attendance is compulsory.’
Every couple of years, all the international editors of Cosmo gather together for a conference. With more than fifty women from dozens of countries converging for several days of fun, wine and work, it’s a bit like a Miss World contest meets a hen’s night at the UN. They’re a trip. Mentally and literally—the meetings are held in a different country every two years and Helen Gurley Brown is very much the reigning monarch. Symbolically at least. Like the Queen at the Commonwealth Games.
My first Cosmo conference was in Amsterdam and a lot had happened to both Helen and me in the few months since we’d met in New York for my job interview. I’d begun my new role as editor and I arrived at the hotel with six advance copies of my first issue packed carefully in my suitcase. Meanwhile, Helen was preparing to step down from the magazine she had created thirty-one years earlier. Her final issue as editor was about to hit news-stands and she wasn’t happy about it.
Leaving Cosmo was not her idea. She was astonishingly, disconcertingly, heartbreakingly candid in private and public about the fact that she was going against her will. ‘I want to keep editing Cosmo,’ she told anyone who’d listen. ‘I’m still a Cosmo girl.’
But Hearst could no longer ignore the fact that Helen was not a ‘girl’ any more. Their biggest and most profitable magazine, a magazine aimed at women under thirty-five, was being edited by someone who was seventy-five. At least. The maths just didn’t work.
To continue pulling in the huge circulation and the associated advertising bucks, US Cosmo had to stay relevant to its target demographic. It had to evolve. And while you don’t necessarily have to be exactly the same age as your reader to edit effectively…five decades older? That’s pushing it.
So finally, the magazine icon had been tapped on her Pucciclad shoulder. Hearst was careful to handle the situation with the utmost respect and diplomacy because Helen had brought the company massive profits, profits that continued to flow from around the world thanks to her winning formula.
A new role of International Editor-in-Chief was created as a parachute and as a way for her to keep contributing to the brand she had built from a blank page. She would continue to work full time in the Hearst building where she would critique all the international issues in personal letters to the editors every month. She would have an office, an assistant, a title. But someone else would be editing Cosmopolitan and she would have no input whatsoever into the US edition. It had to be that way if the new editor was to have any hope of steering the magazine forward. When there are too many drivers at the top, magazines quickly go off the rails and lose their voice. You can only have one vision if you want the magazine to be authentic. Editing by committee is a disaster. And so Helen had to go.
It was never going to be an easy transition for her. The magazine was literally her baby. She and her husband had no kids of their own. As with every aspect of her life, Helen was candid about why not. ‘I never wanted to share my husband’s attention with a child,’ she’d say, admitting to feeling competitive at the very thought. She was happy for other people to have babies and always asked after them with interest, endearingly feigned, but she’d never much liked kids.
The Amsterdam conference was a hugely symbolic moment in Cosmo’s history and it was fraught with politics. It would mark the handing over of US Cosmo from Helen to its new editor, Bonnie Fuller. I had turned up in time to witness a momentous changing of the guard.
It was the opportunity for the foreign editors to hear Bonnie’s plans for US Cosmo in detail, plans that would have a huge effect on our own editions. The licensing arrangements Hearst had with each country meant we had full access to the stories and images in US Cosmo, and we all used this content to varying degrees.
Hearst had always maintained that while the basic Cosmo formula must be applied to every edition of the magazine, it also needed to have the flavour of the country in which it was published. They never installed American editors abroad. Tone and content were adapted subtly by the local editor and her team to suit their market, everywhere from Pakistan to Taiwan, Israel to Kazakhstan. Wherever there were women, there was a market for Cosmopolitan.
However, depending on the size of the country, their expertise and their budget, an international edition might need to use up to ninety per cent of US Cosmo content each month. In Australia, it was closer to forty per cent and I would deliberately whittle that down over the years I edited the magazine. The bulk of US Cosmo’s readers came from middle America, making them older and more conservative than Australian readers. This made much of the content unusable in our market if I wanted to keep Cosmo relevant to young Aussie women and increase circulation.
Australia was one of the most liberal countries in which Cosmo was published and our relaxed attitude to sex meant we could get away with far more raunchy, edgy content than virtually any other Cosmo in the world.
In Amsterdam, while all the international editors had to remain respectful of everything Helen said, the future direction of our own magazines now depended on the new US editor. We were all impatient to hear what changes Bonnie had planned and what they would mean for us.
Bonnie Fuller was herself a publishing powerhouse who had edited several American glossies, inc
luding Marie Claire. She had just turned forty and was pregnant with her third child. Her changes to the magazine included increasing the fashion content and decreasing the word count in features. Cosmo would be a more visual, modern product. We were all excited.
Over the three days we had a variety of presentations and discussions. The schedule was intense. Editors who had experienced particular challenges or triumphs—from dealing with censorship to creating Cosmo TV shows—presented to the group.
There was very little free time, and each night we had a group dinner at a different location in Amsterdam. Between daytime sessions, Helen would zip back to her room to do sit-ups and tricep dips. This was something she did at the office too, several times every day. Her fear of fat drove her to exercise whenever she could, day or night.
‘I exercise for an hour and a half minimum every day, except for when I had a hysterectomy,’ she explained in her soft voice. Then she took two weeks off instead of the recommended six. ‘I’m always hungry,’ she added gaily, eating salad leaves daintily with her fingers. ‘Being skinny is how I fight ageing. Being cute and slim, I can get away with things at seventy-five that I just know I couldn’t do if I was heavy and flabby.’
Helen was nothing if not unique.
I felt enormously privileged to be included among a group of such accomplished, intelligent, ambitious women. Some of them had been editing Cosmo for several decades, although none as long as Helen. I was the newest and the youngest and I had a hell of a lot to learn. As I flew home, for the first time but not for the last, I felt daunted by the task ahead of me.
OOPS. TWO BLUE LINES
Voicemail to Jo, Wendy and Karen from me:
‘Um, hi, call me. I have some news.’
I was pregnant. Surprised, ecstatic and pregnant. As I stood nervously in the doorway of Pat’s office, waiting to go in and tell her my news, I practised my speech in my head while she finished talking on the phone.
She wasn’t going to be happy. I’d only been in my new job for three months and now we’d have to discuss maternity leave. Fortunately, I wasn’t going to need much of that.
‘You won’t even know I’m gone,’ I babbled. ‘I’ll come in for features meetings and to do coverlines and I can read finals from home and the staff can come to my place for art meetings and I’ll be back before you know it, I swear. I only need three months max and—’
I was still talking when she leaped up from her chair and rushed over to give me a hug. ‘Darling, I’m so excited for you,’ she said warmly, meaning it. ‘But we need to talk about your plans, they’re ridiculous.’
She was calm and wise. ‘First, you’re going to take four months off not three. And second, if you have all these arrangements to still be involved in everything while you’re away I’m going to be very uneasy because when you find you can’t actually be here things will fall apart. Better to set it up so that you can have some proper time with your baby.’
Right. Really?
‘But what will I do all day?’ I asked.
She laughed.
I wasn’t kidding. ‘Surely the baby will, you know, eat and sleep a lot and I’ll have quite at lot of spare time, won’t I?’
More laughter. ‘Look darling, you’ll be flat out but I’m thrilled for you. Being a mother will make you a better editor.’
At the time, I had no idea what Pat was talking about. I thought she was just being nice. But in time I’d realise she was right. I’d become more efficient with my time and I’d have better perspective.
Now I just had to get through the next six months until I gave birth.
I had a lot to do. First on my list was coming up with a signature Cosmo event that would make the magazine cooler and sexier. Something that could compete with—or even overtake—Cleo’s Most Eligible Bachelors party as the most iconic magazine event of the year.
When I arrived at Cosmo, there was…nothing. No annual event. No branded list or annual feature to generate PR. Instantly competitive and determined to manufacture some media attention for Cosmo, I decided to start with a calendar of male models, attached to the January issue of the magazine. This meant I got to spend my first few weeks on the job casting hot men along with my fashion editor. We saw dozens of them to the point where all those abs and waxed chests began to blur. If only that had been as much fun as it sounded. Even if I’d been single, it would have been a wasted gift. Male models just aren’t my thing. They’re too…obvious.
With a nonexistent line in the budget for events that year and all available marketing dollars diverted into printing the calendar, all we could scrape together to launch it were a few party pies, some bad wine and a straggle of media at Planet Hollywood. It was all contra. I persuaded Planet Hollywood to provide the venue, food and alcohol in exchange for some coverage of the party in a subsequent issue. More magazine deals are done this way than you could possibly imagine.
The following year, I thought more carefully about how I wanted to position Cosmo. I realised it was futile to try to compete with Cleo’s bachelors. My male models had flopped. I needed to go in a completely different direction if I wanted Cosmo to be something other than me-too.
Working on the premise that—as with bachelors—the media love a list, I came up with the idea of Cosmo naming ‘Australia’s 30 Most Successful Women Under 30’. I wanted to position Cosmo as more than just a mag about sex, angst and beauty tips. I wanted to stop peddling insecurity and start selling aspiration while also injecting some reality into the mix. So I went worthy, by naming, photographing and celebrating the most talented young women in the country in areas as diverse as medicine, social work, comedy, acting, science and business.
I recruited some high-profile judges and scoured newspapers around Australia for young women who were achieving big things in their chosen fields. In my editor’s letter, I referred to our collective waning love affair with supermodels and how it was time to look to women of substance for inspiration: ‘None of these women is engaged to Johnny Depp, has a wardrobe full of Gucci or gets paid millions to endorse lipstick,’ I wrote. ‘But each one has used a unique combination of talent and hard work to achieve a level of excellence in whatever she does, at a remarkably early age.’
From the hundreds of nominees, the judges whittled the list down to thirty. I was adamant that I didn’t want a winner because I felt it was impossible to compare an up-and-coming actor with a scientist or surfer.
The first step towards gaining publicity for the magazine was when the list was released. This meant me doing print and radio interviews. The next step was generating some pictures for TV and the social pages, which meant an event. We threw a cocktail party when I was already three months pregnant. Nobody knew yet and I had to keep excusing myself to run to the bathroom and vomit due to the ‘morning’ sickness that was plaguing me every evening.
The issue sold okay but not fabulously. Still, I felt the annual list was an important aspect of Cosmo’s rebranding so I repeated it for the next couple of years. In year three, I added thirty men under thirty and tried to ignite more media attention by announcing winners—a female social worker and the actor Alex Dimitriades, in hindsight, a perfectly bizarre combination. But worthy didn’t sell and in 2000 I euthanised the concept.
My next approach was if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em. I abandoned worthy and went sexy. I needed a reason to have an event; something to peg a party on. Rather unoriginally, I chose Christmas.
Cosmo had its first sexy Christmas party in 2000, held in a groovy bar with male and female models in bikinis and budgie smugglers serving cocktails and taking Polaroids of guests as souvenirs. There were Christmas trees decorated with plastic handcuffs—which were all quickly swiped—and in the gift bags were Kama Sutra sex positions made out of chocolate. It was raunchy and enormous fun. The following year we had male strippers and the year after that the party was held in a strip club with pole dancers. My last Christmas party as editor and host culminated with the Kylie drag p
erformance. It was a good time to leave.
WOULD YOU LIKE SOME BODY INSECURITY WITH THAT?
Voicemail to the Cosmo fashion editor from me:
‘Thanks for leaving those shots on my desk. The clothes are beautiful and I love the location but the model is too thin. I can see her ribs and she looks about fourteen. How old is she actually? I’m afraid you’re going to have to reshoot. Are there any bigger models around? When you’re back from the studio this arvo can you bring me some model cards? Sorry, I know you put a lot of work into it but we just can’t publish those pictures.’
It didn’t take me long to start beating my body-image drum. While I was wary of repeating my sex and relationships mistake and deleting any key component of the Cosmo philosophy, I was keen to add something new.
My third issue of Cosmo screamed: ‘STRONG & SEXY: THE BODY ISSUE! Forget waifs! What REAL women weigh’.
In my editor’s letter, I wrote about going to a Korean bathhouse in Sydney and how the experience of being among dozens of differently shaped naked women of all ages and ethnicities had been both confronting and fascinating.
Big breasts, flat bottoms, flat chests, scars, curves, bits that wobbled, natural blondes, women who worked out, women who didn’t, mothers, grandmothers—nudity is the ultimate equaliser. Take away the layers of clothes, the make-up and the accessories and suddenly there’s just…our body. And our paranoia about it.
I went on to address the pink elephant in the corner of any discussion about women’s magazines and stated my aim to tackle that elephant responsibly.
Magazines are often accused of promoting this kind of insecurity in women. And once upon a time—back in the dark days of ‘wonder’ diets and waifs—that may have been true. But at Cosmo in 1997, we pride ourselves on presenting a more balanced, healthy image of women. Yes, you may sometimes find slimmer-than-average models on our pages, but you’ll also find a variety of differently shaped women whose income doesn’t depend on fitting into a size ten dress.