by Mia Freedman
Does the celebrity actually come into the office and sit around having meetings, brainstorming coverlines, reading copy and choosing pictures? Uh, no. Not even close. Usually it’s a chat with the editor and a couple of emails. But it sounds impressive and it’s PR gold.
In practice, guest-editing means that the issue is themed around the celebrity and the content slanted to reflect their signature area of fame and expertise. Sara-Marie had plenty of fame but no expertise. What made her so appealing was her authentic surprise that she’d somehow become famous. To me, it was all about her bubbly confidence, particularly her body confidence. What was her secret? How could she be so uninhibited, letting it all hang out and happily slapping her own bum, even though it was quite big? That’s what women—even those far thinner than her—wanted to know.
I put all the Body Love content for that special issue—about twenty-four pages—behind the Sara-Marie cover to justify doing the flip and make each side feel like a ‘proper’ magazine. We went to print and I felt satisfied that I’d done something really positive for women. I knew the issue would be a talking point and I was looking forward to the reaction from readers—I was sure they’d adore it.
The reaction built quickly. But not in a good way. If I’d been expecting a ticker-tape parade in my honour for Services For The Advancement Of Positive Female Body Image In The Media, I’d have been brutally disappointed.
It started with a trickle of letters saying how much they loved the shots of Sara-Marie and Sara-Marie herself. So far so good. I waited for more to come. But then, one newspaper printed a small, snarky piece about how appalling it was that Cosmo had put Sara-Marie on the ‘back’ cover and size-eight Britney on the front.
It wasn’t a big story but it was a slow news week and so it ignited a firestorm, one I was totally unprepared for. Overnight, media around the country were calling me for interviews to explain my ‘shoddy treatment of Sara-Marie’. Readers’ letters began to pour in, protesting against her relegation to ‘secondclass citizen’ on the ‘back’ cover. ‘Shame, Cosmo, shame,’ they jeered.
I was called a hypocrite. A traitor. A sell-out. A coward. Definitely no ticker-tape parade for me, then.
The media coverage snowballed. Everything I said was twisted and used against me as yet more proof that Cosmo was insulting Sara-Marie and dissing all women larger than size eight. The story got bigger and uglier and refused to go away. The Women’s Electoral Lobby even issued a statement condemning Cosmopolitan and me.
At first I was shocked and bewildered by the reaction. Then angry. And finally, dismayed. Dismayed that my intentions had been so drastically misinterpreted and that I was being accused of the very thing I had always railed against—promoting body insecurity among women.
The interviews I did went something like this.
Them: ‘You put Sara-Marie on the back cover because she’s fat, didn’t you? Britney was the real cover because she’s skinny.’
Me: [trying not to sound upset or defensive and failing miserably]. ‘Not true! Britney was always going to be on the cover of the October issue. Sara-Marie was a late and controversial inclusion, not because she wasn’t skinny but because she was famous for coming third on a reality TV show—not the usual criteria for a Cosmopolitan covergirl.’
Them: ‘Why did newsagents have the Britney cover face-up instead of Sara-Marie?’
Me: ‘We treated the two covers exactly the same way from a design point of view and explicitly asked newsagents and supermarkets to display half Britney and half Sara-Marie. But apart from visiting newsagents personally, we have no control over how they display the magazine.’
Them: ‘It was all just a gimmick to sell magazines, wasn’t it? You don’t care about body image at all.’
Me: ‘That’s absolutely not true. I won’t pretend my job as an editor is not to sell magazines. Of course it is. But Cosmo is not new to the issue of body image. And this could never be described as a cynical or token gesture. We’re the only women’s magazine to feature women up to size sixteen every single month.
‘And we built an entire issue around Sara-Marie. Not only was she the guest-editor, inside the magazine she had ten pages of coverage compared to Britney’s four. Doesn’t that count for anything?”
Them: ‘Not when larger women feel you’ve insulted them. Because you have.’
It was a feeding frenzy and I was being mauled by pissed-off sharks. Ironically, by trying to buck the typical magazine trend towards skinny girls, I’d made the ultimate mistake: I did something, but not enough.
Not for the first or last time, I had become the whipping girl for everything that was wrong with the fashion and magazine industries in their portrayal of women. And the more I tried to explain myself, the angrier people seemed to become and the bigger the story became.
In the end, I did dozens of interviews with hostile journalists and replied personally to hundreds of readers’ letters. In the next issue, I printed a Q&A, answering all the questions I’d been asked and refuting the accusations made against Cosmo.
Meanwhile, Hearst was horrified that Sara-Marie was anywhere near the cover at all. They were by now familiar with my body image obsession and while they weren’t thrilled about the bigger models I used inside the magazine, they indulged me because sales were very good. But by putting Sara-Marie on the cover—back, front, flip, whatever you wanted to call it—I’d pushed them too far.
I received a terse lecture from Helen about the bad example I was setting for other Cosmo editors. What if Poland wanted to put a rotund housewife on the cover? It just wasn’t Cosmo.
Through it all, Pat was a calming voice. ‘With all this media attention, sales should be good,’ she reassured me. ‘Just watch.’ And they were. Fantastic, despite the ongoing press frenzy that was entering its third week.
And then it was September 11 and Sara-Marie and Cosmo suddenly weren’t important at all any more.
FEAR OF FLYING
SMS to Jen from me:
‘Cosmo conference not in Paris any more. I think they’re trying to kill me…’
From a human point of view, September 11 was tragic beyond all imagining. From a business point of view, circulation was instantly affected. Sales of magazines froze completely as everyone bought newspapers and compulsively watched TV instead. But after about a week, things changed. Like many, I made the decision to turn off the TV and look away. It felt like the coverage had gone from reporting the news to ghoulishly chronicling people’s private pain. It felt like voyeurism. Grief porn. And I desperately wanted to avert my gaze. The crisis was over—in immediate terms—and the personal stories of the victims and their families were just too distressing and too vast to digest. Collectively, we seemed to make the same decision: Enough. I need distraction. I need trivia. I need something superficial to take my mind off the deeply shocking things I’ve seen and read.
And with that, people went back to the movies, started watching sitcoms and began buying magazines again. Sara-Marie seemed like a lifetime ago. It had only been ten days.
As I’d watched the planes hit those buildings, again and again during that week, I remember thinking to myself, ‘I will never be able to go to New York again.’ I was already a terribly nervous flier, and now I had images that transcended my worst fears by a million per cent. I knew with complete certainty that I would never again have the courage to board a plane to the US. I wondered if I’d ever be able to board a plane again period.
And then, in an act of spontaneous patriotism and parochial largesse, Hearst decided to support its local economy by cancelling plans to hold the forthcoming Cosmo conference in Paris and instead flying all its editors from around the world to…New York. Specifically, downtown New York, mere blocks from the still smouldering ruins of Ground Zero. It was less than six months after September 11 and attendance was compulsory. Clearly, the universe was trying to tell me something. Possibly, Harden the Fuck Up.
Before giving birth, I quite enjoyed flyi
ng. I’m not certain how I went from ‘This is fun!’ to ‘We’re all going to die!’ but I’d been stuck there for several years.
When you’re not scared of something, it’s hard to understand the headspace of someone who is. If you told me you were scared of, say, walking down the street because a lion might eat you, I would want to slap you about the face and shout, ‘Pull yourself together, silly twit! Lions don’t roam free in the street!’ But for you, the fear would be real and paralysing and my noefforts to snap you out of it with logic would be futile.
So here’s what you need to know if you meet someone with aerophobia: save the ‘More-people-die-in-car-accidents-than-plane-crashes’ speech because it will not—I repeat not—cut the mustard. All we will hear is ‘…people die in…plane crashes.’ And we knew that already.
For a long time, my hopeless solution to this inconvenient fear was to avoid flying. Genius. And when I absolutely couldn’t avoid it? Prescription drugs.
And just when I thought I couldn’t be any more terrified of flying? Terrorism. Overnight, I could now panic not just about accidental plane crashes but deliberate ones too. Previously I’d been able to hold it together for essential domestic flights and took sleeping pills for overseas ones to block out as much of the experience as possible. But now I was being forced to face down my fear by flying to New York.
Clearly, sleeping pills weren’t going to be nearly enough. When I went to my GP on the verge of tears at the mere thought of getting on that plane, she prescribed a lovely little anti-anxiety tablet called Xanax. It’s also used to treat panic attacks and is one of the most commonly prescribed medications for aerophobia. She gave me sleeping pills for the flight itself as well, but I could start taking Xanax a few days before departure in order to make it to the airport without a straitjacket.
Well, let me tell you, Xanax was a hoot. God, how I loved those little blue guys. I was so utterly chilled during that flight to New York, I even managed a jaunty spot of duty-free shopping while in transit at LA airport. Not until I checked my Visa statement the following month did I notice I’d spent $345—on lip gloss. Three hundred and forty-five American dollars. That’s a whole lot of happily whacked.
Unhappily, Visa-abuse wasn’t my only Xanax side effect. When its beautifully calming effects wore off, I awoke that first New York morning in absolute blind terror. It didn’t help that, mere months after 9/11, New Yorkers were still jumping every time a plane flew overhead, a siren sounded or a car backfired.
I remember virtually nothing of that conference except Woody Allen and Kim Cattrall being guest speakers and a Hearst executive sussing me out at a group dinner about the prospect of my moving to New York to edit a magazine for them over there. I believe the words ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ may have escaped my lips. The sensation that I was going to die was so strong and my need to get back to Jason and Luca so primal, I was almost out of my mind. This raw panic barely eased for the five days of my trip and only subsided when I popped another happy blue pill for my return flight.
If only that was the end of it. Shortly after I arrived home, the panic returned for another forty-eight hours. This made no sense because I was back with my family and away from any perceived danger. I put the whole experience down to my aerophobia reaching new post-9/11 extremes, but my GP disagreed. ‘Rebound anxiety,’ she concluded. ‘It’s not uncommon with Xanax. The drug holds your anxiety at bay but as soon as the effects wear off, your anxiety returns even more intensely.’ So, no fear of flying while in the air but a paralysing fear of being on the ground for several days afterwards! Superb! Bye-bye beautiful Xanax; I’ll miss you like the deserts miss the rain.
I don’t like taking drugs in my regular life and I don’t have a lot of luck taking them while up in the sky. On one trip to Europe a few years ago with Jason, I was making do with sleeping pills alone. This was mostly effective until the final leg of a million-hour trip home. After a torturous transit day in Tokyo airport, we boarded the plane along with a tourist group of about a hundred excitable Japanese students. ‘Goodness, it’s a bit like being at a Spice Girls concert, isn’t it?’ I cracked to the male flight attendant, who giggled with me conspiratorially. Accepting his offer of a glass of champagne, I knocked it back with a Stilnox sleeping pill, eagerly awaiting the sleepy wave I knew would break over my head within a few minutes. I politely refused the offer of dinner and happily, sleepily, reclined my seat. Ahhhhhhh.
The next thing I knew, breakfast was being served and, according to my watch, seven hours had passed. I felt well rested although I was slightly puzzled by the odd looks coming from the flight attendants. The guy I’d joked with wouldn’t look me in the eye. And why were my hands covered in chicken?
Jason helpfully filled in the blanks. Apparently, soon after going to sleep, I woke up again and decided that I did, in fact want dinner. Immediately. So I sat up in my reclined seat, started to groggily eat the chicken cacciatore I was brought and then began to sob hysterically. In silence.
Concerned, but not surprised (he’s been travelling with me for years, poor man), Jason calmly inquired what the problem might be. This is apparently when I started shouting at him. Again, in silence. My mouth was moving—a lot—and tears were streaming down my face while I waved my arms about, but no noise was coming out of my mouth. Which is a good thing really because it was full of chicken.
Ignoring all this, he gently tried to adjust my seat so it was upright while I ate and cried, but, perturbed by his actions, I attempted to stab his fingers with my fork, which I then dropped before continuing to eat with my hands. The flight attendants made a few attempts to see if everything was okay, but when it became clear I was certifiably cuckoo, they vanished discreetly to leave my husband to deal with his nutbag alone.
Eventually, I passed out with a piece of chicken clutched in each fist and slept solidly for seven hours. Dreaming of train travel, no doubt.
This little incident would have forever been consigned to the family file marked ‘Mia’s Eccentric Flying Episodes’ were it not for the publicity that later surrounded Stilnox. It turns out I wasn’t the only one to have a strange reaction to the drug, although perhaps I’m the only one who’s done so on a plane with a chicken.
I WANT TO BE FAMOUS, DON’T I?
SMS to me from my mum:
‘Darling, you were fabulous this morning! And I’m not just saying that because I’m your mum. Dad thought so too!’
‘First, we have to get you some voice coaching,’ the TV executive announced immediately after suggesting I become a regular on Channel Nine’s ‘Today’. And with those mortifying words, my stint on breakfast TV began.
I still adored my job but there was a repetition and rhythm about magazine production that made me feel secure and comfortable and also a little…bored.
After more than a decade working for Cleo and Cosmo, I wanted some new challenges. I was already writing a column each week in a Sunday newspaper. And then ‘Today’ approached me about becoming their lifestyle reporter. They wanted to introduce a bit more magazine-style content and needed someone to do stories on fashion, trends and ‘women’s issues’.
I was flattered and anxious.
And that’s before the TV executive told me I had a rubbish voice. The massive insecurity inherent in being in front of the camera had begun. Welcome to TV! Check your self-confidence at the door! Until that day, I’d thought my voice was perfectly acceptable. Pah! Stupid girl. To work on television, you need a particular type of voice. One different to mine, apparently.
This is how I came to find myself several weeks later marching around a Channel Nine boardroom table in bare feet loudly humming ‘Jingle Bells’ in an attempt to sound less ‘nasal’. It was my voice coach’s suggestion. My. Voice. Coach. How did this happen? And more importantly, was I on crack?
Like most people who watch TV, I thought being on it would be easy peasy. You turn up. You be yourself. Not too tricky, surely?
Over the next year
or so, I would be taught many things. How to talk was merely one of them. I also learned how to sit on an interview couch, how to walk and talk simultaneously, how to stop slouching and how to wear a bra to prevent VBD (visible boob droop).
In my first appearance on ‘Today’, a riveting segment about buying jeans, I did all of the above incorrectly and was given a stern talking-to from the woman at Nine whose job it was to notice such things. After making me watch the video tape of my segment, I had to admit she was right, even though it was hard to concentrate when all I wanted to do was reach through the TV and slap myself across the face.
From that first week on air, I was on the back foot. Voice lessons were stepped up. Bra straps were tightened. Couch sitting was practised. Seriously. I was so busy trying not to slouch, droop or mumble during my weekly six-minute segment, it’s a damn miracle I had time to hold down my day job.
Even with all the coaching, I had some corkers. One week, I did a segment on people hiring private investigators to trail cheating spouses. As part of my chat with then host Steve Liebmann in the studio, I was given a few props to discuss.
Most of them were innocuous, like handbags with hidden inbuilt cameras. But there was also a kit for detecting semen on underwear. The nauseating idea being you retrieve your partner’s knickers, squirt this stuff onto the crotch and wait for the fabric to change colour if semen present, indicating that the wearer of the undies had seen some action.
Steve, understandably, wasn’t keen to mention the semen detection kit and tried to ignore it, but I hauled him back from his journalistic integrity with the following display of TV Tourette syndrome: ‘Now Steve, the kit says it can be used to detect infidelity in both men and women and that’s got me a bit baffled.’