by Mia Freedman
Steve had gone slightly grey under his make-up but I ploughed on, unable to stop myself. ‘Like, I understand how it would work on women’s undies—but men? I mean, what if some semen just fell out during the day?’
Across the studio, I heard Steve’s co-host Tracy Grimshaw spit out her coffee. Possibly through her nose. The crew similarly began convulsing with laughter.
Back on the couch, Steve’s face turned to stone before he quickly wrapped up the segment and threw to a commercial. As soon as we were off air, he gently hit me over the head with his script and stalked off.
To my surprise, he didn’t have me summarily fired, or even killed. In fact he never mentioned it again and was always supportive and encouraging. Sadly, it was also poor Steve who bore the brunt of my next debacle.
It was Melbourne Cup day and I was set to do my first live cross at 8.10 am. We were at a posh garden party where some ladies in hats had been wrangled to stand around and look glamorous. Then there was me. And a horse. A big horse that had some claim to Cup fame I was meant to mention and instantly forgot.
Before I could check with the producer what I should say about the horse, a microphone was shoved in my hand and we went live. I stumbled awkwardly through for the first thirty seconds or so of the segment, babbling away to Steve, mispronouncing the name of the champagne sponsor, forgetting the name of the park we were in and stammering like an idiot. Then the big scary horse lunged towards me and tried to eat my microphone.
In my panic, I threw back to Steve in the studio, but since I’d been supposed to talk a fair bit longer, Steve had taken the opportunity to duck out and refill his coffee. Sorry again, Steve.
No doubt, hundreds of thousands of people were at that moment looking at their TVs and saying, ‘Who is the idiot with the horse?’ One senior executive at Nine who was watching TV at that moment happened to be married to a friend of mine. Later she told me he’d looked pityingly at the screen and said, ‘She’s really not a natural, is she?’
There were other problems too. Being an editor and a control freak, I hated having other people involved in deciding what my segment would be about and how it would work. Not that I wasn’t willing to take direction—I knew nothing about TV and I wanted to learn—but no one had time to explain anything to me and every week I was assigned a different producer.
The other challenge was discovering how insecure TV made me feel. It took a while, but I eventually realised that if anyone said, ‘You were great,’ it simply meant they liked what I was wearing. Not once could anyone remember a thing I’d said.
In this way it was so different to writing where it’s all about the content. For a print journalist, it doesn’t matter if you have three heads and hairy palms. You can sit on a couch backwards and still write a good story. On TV, appearances are everything. And when you’re sitting in hair and make-up at 6 am with your eyes glued shut because your child woke three times in the night with a bad dream, appearances are not your strongest suit.
I always felt a bit dirty after being on TV. Exposed. Vulnerable. In need of reassurance that I had indeed been great because I never had a clue if I was, and usually I wasn’t.
This was all horribly tiresome, so it was almost a relief when a new executive producer decided to axe my segment. I never missed being on TV for a moment. Unfortunately, TV wasn’t quite done with me yet.
ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A BANANA
SMS to me from Karen:
‘Have you seen the paper? When did you turn into The Devil Wears Prada?’
I met the real Kylie Minogue once. Back in the day, a year or so after I first started at Cleo, I was filling in at the front desk one time for the editorial coordinator, who was at lunch.
The role of ‘editorial coordinator’ sounds hugely important and in many ways it is, although receptionist would be an equally accurate title. You could be forgiven for assuming the coordinator was deeply integrated in the editorial process, regulating the flow of words and pictures that goes into the magazine. In truth, it is a purely administrative role.
Still, it’s an important one because the editorial coordinator is the gatekeeper for the magazine, the first voice you hear when you call, the first face you see when you visit. And she knows where the biscuits are kept.
For someone keen to break into magazines, editorial coordinator is the most common entry point and one that almost always leads somewhere if you’re smart, hard-working and disciplined.
There is, however, a trap that frequently thwarts the chances of promotion of the editorial coordinators. In fact, it applies to every level of the career ladder if you’re interested in climbing it. Usually, around the time you become sick of your job and yearn to climb higher, you start doing it badly. Consciously or unconsciously, it can be difficult to disguise your boredom and frustration. Your standards slip. Your boss notices. So when you finally summon the courage to walk into her office and ask for a promotion, there’s every chance she’ll refuse since it appears you can barely handle your current, more menial job. Why should she trust you and reward you with a better one?
This happened to me a few times at significant points in my career and it was a lesson I was slow to learn: the less you like your job, the better you have to do it in order to land a better one.
Anyway, on this particular day when the real editorial coordinator went to lunch, she asked me to cover for her. I was beauty writer at the time and as a relatively new and very junior member of staff, the task of minding the front desk sometimes fell to me.
I didn’t mind at all. I loved answering the phone and doing admin. Possibly because it wasn’t my real job and it felt like a novelty. Like babysitting someone else’s child for an hour or so. In fact, working at Cleo in the first place still felt like such an extraordinary dream I was continually surprised every fortnight when I received my pay slip. All this and money too?
At first I didn’t recognise the small, pale, skinny girl who wandered up to the front desk alone. Her hair was cropped boyshort and she was wearing jeans, a jacket, flats and no visible make-up. ‘Hi, I’m looking for Nicole Bonython,’ she said in a small voice with an upwards inflection and I began replying automatically before it registered who I was talking to.
Nicole was Cleo’s fashion director and had known Kylie Minogue since early in her career when she had styled her for some photo shoots and music videos. They’d been friends for years, and even though Kylie now lived in London, they always caught up when she came home.
I tried to stop the flash of recognition before it showed on my face, partly so Kylie wouldn’t feel awkward but more to suggest that I was completely used to chatting with celebrities in the course of my workday. Which, of course, I wasn’t.
Kylie thanked me politely and disappeared into the cramped rabbit warren of our office, following my directions to Nicole’s desk.
Meeting Kylie Minogue—if you can call our fifteen-second exchange ‘meeting’—was not just another day at the office for me. Such exciting things rarely happen at a magazine. The reality is far more mundane and even the aspects of mag life that appear glamorous from the outside quickly become background noise.
Editors and magazine staff don’t mean to become jaded but, yes, it happens. I won’t pretend there aren’t some tremendously fun, indulgent, bizarre and impossibly fabulous things about working on a magazine. There are exotic location shoots and film premieres and celebrity interviews and travel and fashion shows and mountains of free stuff. But like anything, if you do it often enough, the wow factor eventually fades. It’s just What You Do Every Day At Work.
I’m so used to rattling off a stern lecture entitled ‘A Magazine Career is not Glamorous’ to wide-eyed girls desperate to break into the industry, I’m quite capable of making it sound about as appealing as working in an abattoir.
This is something all magazine editors do regularly—for several reasons. First, it’s to justify our own existence as something more than caricatures. According to ‘Abs
olutely Fabulous’, ‘Ugly Betty’ and The Devil Wears Prada, there are really only two types of women who work in magazines: the ambitious bitch and the vacuous bimbo, neither of whom does much actual work.
These stereotypes are annoying for most of us who are neither bitch nor bimbo. That’s why we’re sometimes defensive and trumpet the lack of glamour a little too loudly.
But mainly, we do it to deter the thousands of girls who’ve watched those TV shows and read those books and seen those movies and are gagging to wangle their way into an industry that looks like a cross between ‘Australia’s Next Top Model’ and the MTV awards. Girls who assume working at a magazine will be the same glossy, glamorous experience as reading it.
I was one of those girls and the realisation that the pages of the magazine bore little resemblance to what goes on behind the scenes hit me fast. It began as I walked into Lisa’s office that first day and tripped over the masking tape holding down the frayed carpet. It was completed a few weeks later when a cockroach fell from the air-conditioning vent into my coffee cup perched on my tiny work-experience desk.
Frankly, I couldn’t have cared less about my surroundings. The business of making magazines was more exciting to me than anything I’d ever experienced. I was not a princess. My broken chair didn’t faze me and neither did my crappy desk shoved against a wall in the windowless features room. Pathetic gratitude was the overwhelming emotion I felt during my weeks and months of work experience.
Which was why when I became an editor myself, the very different attitude of some work-experience girls was a rude shock.
One Sunday morning, soon after I’d left Cosmo, I was sitting peacefully on my couch, sipping tea and reading the papers. I was flicking fairly mindlessly, my brain preoccupied by the pressing question: ‘How early is too early for yum cha?’ and the related dilemma: ‘Can I feasibly eat prawn gow gees before 10 am?’ Just when I’d decided ‘Yes I can!’, my focus was drawn back to the newspaper by the unwelcome sight of my own face staring up at me. It took a moment before I processed what I was looking at.
Oh dear. I detest looking at pictures of myself in any context, let alone the news section of the paper. That always meant trouble.
The gist of the story was that the magazine industry was apparently in a ‘tizz’ about some anonymous rumours on a website. One of them tut-tutted that ‘Mia Freedman once sent a work-experience person out to buy her son a banana.’ A banana. Wow. Lucky I was sitting down when I read that jaw-dropping revelation.
Here’s a brief snapshot of the thoughts that flashed through my mind at that point:
Did I do that? Possibly. But more likely banana was for self. Son not partial to bananas.
Even if true about son, banana is fruit. Good Mother points there.
At least no mention of the time I sent art director to buy my son McDonald’s. That definitely happened. Look, she was going there anyway.
Why is this ridiculous thing in newspaper? Has world gone mad?
As my friends and family woke up and read the story, my phone began to beep.
‘At least it wasn’t a Mars Bar!’ texted my mum.
‘You are a selfish cow,’ texted an editor friend. ‘Why didn’t you let work-experience girl choose the cover and send her to a fashion show in Paris?’
For the next few days, I thought a lot about work-experience students and how their expectations had changed since I’d been one. In short: a lot. When Lisa gave me my break, I was genuinely grateful for the chance to fetch her coffee or her mail. I would have gladly washed her car—or her feet—had I been asked. Heck, I would have blow-dried her dog. (I do know someone who was asked to do this for the editor when she did work experience at a fashion magazine.) During the time I did work experience at Cleo, I believe I was also regularly sent out to buy assorted muffins and sandwiches for various members of staff. And one time? Some sushi. I know. But it’s true.
I was stoked just to be in the office, breathing magazine air. Certainly, I was ambitious and knew from day one I wanted to be an editor, but even with the arrogance of youth, I understood it would take a little time before I got to do the fun and important stuff.
Since I’d started my own career as one, I’d always had a soft spot for work-experience girls and most of them were fantastic. As Cosmo editor, I insisted we have a structured program to give them a well-rounded understanding of how a magazine worked. Inevitably, this included some boring tasks because—GUESS WHAT, KIDS?—there are many boring tasks to be done in every workplace. By everyone, including the editor.
Over the years, I began to notice a change in attitude from some of the girls who passed through the office. Gratitude and ambition were being replaced with a sense of entitlement and absurd expectations.
I’m guessing that Banana Girl was one of those: a sixteen-year-old who rocked up for her week at Cosmo expecting to interview Madonna and sit front row at fashion week. That’s the kind of experience she was after, thanks. And she wasn’t the only one. It was starting to drive my already overworked staff nuts. Accommodating work experience kids takes a lot of extra time and energy for whoever is managing them—usually the very busy, poorly paid editorial coordinator.
So all the talk about work-experience students doing ‘unpaid labour’, as some of them put it, needs to be put in the context of the ‘unpaid labour’ done by whoever is responsible for looking after them, answering their questions, setting them tasks, supervising the completion of these tasks (and often having to redo them) and trying to ensure they have a pleasant, educational experience.
The other expectation I noticed among work-experience girls was that they would be—should be—spending quality time with me. When I was an editor, the truth was that I didn’t have much to do with work-experience girls. Not because I was superior or a snob or a bitch but because I was just too busy. I had to prioritise the needs of my boss, my staff and my own family above those of work-experience girls. There were simply not enough hours in the day to sit down and have long or even short chats with the hundreds of girls who came through our work-experience program every year.
Often, this was my loss, and I knew it.
Whenever it was possible, I’d try to talk to the girls or answer their questions, but the demands of my job meant this rarely happened. I always tried, though, because I knew the work-experience girls were not just readers, but likely to be passionate and loyal readers. I always valued hearing their thoughts on my magazines and magazines in general.
When I was at Cosmo, I designed a questionnaire for all work-experience girls to fill out, and whenever possible I’d call them into my office and ask them to pick their most and least favourite covers from my wall. I was never so arrogant to think I couldn’t learn from them. My success depended on listening to their opinions.
As far as menial tasks go, I can’t remember ever asking a work-experience student to do anything personally. I didn’t have that kind of involvement with them, and anyway, that’s why I had an assistant. That’s not to say they weren’t asked to do things for me by other people. Because sometimes, when she was exceptionally busy, I’m sure my assistant passed on some of her more menial tasks to the work-experience students. Like banana retrieval. It’s called time management and delegation, two crucial skills in any workplace.
It got to the point where before ‘workies’ came in, we informed them in writing that ‘You will be required to do administrative tasks and whatever else is required to help around the office, including trips to the mail room, coffee runs, filing etc.’
Most were fine with that and grateful for the opportunity, but some decided this wasn’t, like, acceptable and never showed up. Others showed up and then sulked. Or disappeared midweek. There were some real standouts over the years.
Like the girl who emailed me directly with a story idea and signed off with, ‘Get back to me ASAP.’
Or the one who refused to help the fashion assistant take clothes down to the courier dock, insisting, ‘I hav
e a degree; I’m not a Sherpa.’
Or the one who announced to my deputy editor, ‘I’d really like to interview a celebrity while I’m here. Can you arrange it?’
Of course, many work-experience students were wonderful young women and, occasionally, young men, bless their brave souls. As my features editor once observed, ‘It would be a fifty–fifty split: the little creatures who slump and sigh at being asked to get the mail, and those who have already gone down and brought it back before you can ask.’
Guess who gets invited back and is ultimately offered a job?
SEX AT THE CHECKOUT
SMS to Mia from Alice:
‘In car listening to Triple J today after school. Heard you on radio. Jimmy’s been telling everyone, “I heard Luca’s mummy say sex on the radio!” Hilarious. A xx’
Sometimes big moments in your life don’t happen the way you expect them to. I always thought my decision to quit Cosmo would be an agonising one. But after seven years and one hundred issues, it all came down to two simple moments, a few hours apart. They would suddenly crystallise a murky mix of thoughts, emotions, doubts and suspicions that had been brewing for more than a year.
My moment of clarity came while I was in the eye of a media storm that had taken me completely by surprise, just like the Sara-Marie cover incident. Even after seven years, I still couldn’t always pick what would spark publicity. Sometimes I’d think we had a killer story, get all excited, and then be utterly deflated when it died, ignored by the media.
Other times, like this one, I was blind-sided by a PR disaster I never saw coming.
A couple of months earlier, I knew exactly what I was doing when I commissioned yet another sealed section, a how-to oral-sex story that ran over six pages. I was trying to sell magazines in the same way editors of Cosmo, Cleo and others had done for decades. With sex.