by Mark Dapin
ACP printed 105 000 copies of the first issue of Ralph. Brad said he would be happy to sell half that number. In fact, Ralph sold 65 000. The team was elated, and Seddo, in particular, felt vindicated. He knew he was not wholly trusted with the magazine – the first launch since James Packer had taken over from Kerry at ACP – but he believed he had delivered.
Ralph number two sold 48 000. Ralph number three sold 36 500. As sales shrank, Ralph’s staff grew. They had moved to larger offices on the eighth floor of Park Street when Brad invited me to go to see Seddo again. Brad wanted me in Ralph. Seddo, once again, seemed nonplussed by the idea, and I was not particularly enthusiastic, either. I wrote a feature under a pen-name. By now I was happy to have my name and picture in Black Label Penthouse, but I did not want to be associated with something ‘politically incorrect’.
By issue three, there were only 19 pages of ads in Ralph, and the magazine had shrunk from 130 pages to 114. FHM was now outselling Loaded in the UK. FHM’s owner, EMAP, had bought Australian Playboy publisher Mason-Stewart, and was clearly planning to launch locally. The pressure intensified on Seddo to make Ralph ‘more like FHM’, although he had never wanted to produce FHM, and had been told he would not have to. FHM’s biggest issue of the year carried a bonus magazine, ‘The World’s 100 Sexiest Women’, nominated by the readers. It was typical of the way Ralph was published at the time that ACP tried to create a product exactly half as good: Ralph’s ‘50 Sexiest Women on the Planet’, nominated by Ralph’s editorial staff. The first ‘winner’ was Liv Tyler.
First-time buyers were disappointed with Ralph, while potential new readers were not picking it up because it had a reputation as a sexist rag – largely due to the first ad campaign. Sargant Rollins Vranken Terakes was therefore commissioned to create a new campaign aimed at changing the perception of Ralph from the one Sargant Rollins Vranken Terakes had created in the first place.
The second campaign featured a drawing of a stickman reading a magazine and saying ‘Wow’, with the underline ‘Surprising Ralph’. The message was supposed to be ‘There’s more to Ralph than you’d imagine’ but it looked like ‘The stickman reads Ralph. Be like the stickman, read Ralph too’, which would only have made sense in a society that gave prominence and respect to the opinions of stickmen.
Once again, I’m sure the campaign followed the brief – to avoid controversy and concentrate on content – but, once again, it gave few hints as to what the magazine might be about.
Ralph’s slide was halted by the move to perfect binding in January 1998. From a print run of 60 000, the first perfect-bound issue, featuring soapie star Melissa Bell, pulled circulation back up to 43 000. Tim Scott, from The Picture, became deputy editor of Ralph, allowing Seddo to take two weeks holiday. The tension between Seddo and Nick matured into unguarded antipathy. When he came back from the bush, Seddo, still on the salary he had earned as chief sub at The Picture but now running a national magazine, asked Nick for a pay rise, which he refused.
Seddo told Brad he wanted to leave.
‘Do you want to go this afternoon?’ asked Brad.
‘How about Friday?’ said Seddo.
Tim Scott was made editor, and asked if I would be his deputy. I said I was only interested in editing a magazine. Startlingly, Tim offered to step down. Brad said he wanted an editor who would eat, breathe and dream the magazine. Ralph needed somebody to love it. Not for the last time, I wondered what he was talking about. Not for the last time, he was right.
I had breakfast with Brad and Nick. I told them Ralph’s early fashion pages were both pointless and damaging. The first issue actually featured women’s fashion – women in bikini bottoms and t-shirts posed as if they were being judged in a wet t-shirt contest, with an inexplicable sidebar showing men’s boots. Number two showed a busty blonde model in a bikini hanging out men’s shirts on a Hills Hoist. At these points, there seemed to be no difference between Ralph and its ad campaign. Other fashion pages featured Jack dressed as a cowboy; Barry Crocker with climbing equipment; Kamahl in cricket whites; and Larrry Emdur in a wetsuit. The fashion industry expects magazines to make its clothes look glamorous. Ralph made them look cheap. In return, fashion shoots make the magazine look glamorous. Ralph shoots made the magazine look cheap.
In his office, Brad asked me how I would create a magazine that would appeal to every bloke in Australia, from stockbrokers to bushies. I said I would not. ACP had missed the point of the men’s lifestyle magazines. They were never supposed to reach out to the rural poor. They might write about them, but they did not write for them. The lads’ mags were the opposite of the AFR Magazine. They were counter-aspirational. In their stories about fighting, fucking and drinking until you dropped, they no more reflected the readers’ reality than the AFR Magazine’s lifestyles of the rich and rapacious – but their market overlapped. They offered ordinary men a lumpen, déclassé fantasy, just as the AFR Magazine sold them an upper-class dream. Out in the bush, people did not have lifestyles, they had lives. There was no point in trying to interest them in designer clothes, or men’s fragrances that cost more than their week’s rent. There was a lot of talk about the use of irony in the UK lads’ magazines, but the real irony was that few real ‘lads’ ever bought them. They sold to the hip and educated, not the illiterate and incarcerated. They also did great business in male-dominated societies such as the military, where most men were young and single, and most women were pin-ups above their bunks.
I was offered the job. Things had moved so quickly, I barely had time to construct a complex, self-serving, and fairly stupid argument to allow myself to take it. I needed my own private war – my internal dialogue with D, the feeling I had something to show her – to push me to do anything. I had infuriated her by saying I could run a magazine better than many of the editors we knew. She had enraged me by telling me I could not. I knew I could write, and I had a feeling for design and typography, and a reluctant ability to organise everybody around me into one big gang. I knew I could do it, and I knew it was pointless compared with defending trade union rights, reaching out to the Aboriginal community, or resisting the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, but I was doing none of these things, anyway – I was sitting at home, looking out of the window.
I decided I could edit a magazine – and market it, and sell it – to show D and the world that it was easy, and therefore it was pointless, so other people would no longer aspire to it, and would understand management was an unskilled job that anyone could do, and be inspired to overthrow capitalism. Or perhaps I just wanted to be a magazine editor because it looked like a laugh. If only people realised how difficult it is to be a Marxist of the mind, tirelessly fighting the class struggle with yourself . . .
The French theorist Baudrillard wrote that there was no escape from capitalism’s spectacle: ‘All that one could hope to do was retreat into deep cover, taking a position of frozen equanimity within the society which one despised, and participating in its evils so fully and wholeheartedly, that in retrospect one’s actions could only be understood as a form of irony.’ That was the idea, anyway. I went into the job like a swaggering sailor on shore leave, seducing an ungainly waitress for a bet. Inevitably, I fell in love.
The Friday before I was due to start, Brad invited me to David Naylor’s farewell dinner. This was a historic moment in the story of Australian men’s magazines, and one I cannot quite recall. I did not want to get too drunk as I was meeting so many people for the first time, but I need to drink when I am meeting people for the first time, so I decided to order wine instead of beer. Wine is a civilised drink. One takes it with a meal, and it inspires one to elegant conversation about the arts and so forth. I have often tried not to get drunk by drinking wine, and things usually start well enough: it takes a couple of glasses before I even notice I am having alcohol, a couple more before I start to feel dissatisfied with the flat, colourless and non-beery taste of chardonnay, and a few more that I take purely because I have resolved to d
rink wine, and it would be weak-willed to fracture my resolve so early in the evening.
At Naylor’s farewell, I followed this pattern. When I had drunk enough wine to ensure I would remain sober, I switched to Toohey’s Dry. This was an excellent idea, as Toohey’s Dry had a lower alcohol content than wine, therefore I could drink more of it. Just to top up my sobriety, I chased Toohey’s Drys with the occasional glass of white wine.
I remember Naylor’s farewell as a finger painting made from rolled thumbprints. Rubber-faced strangers with wobbly bodies led me to conspiratorial tables and told me what had to be done. I declared I was going to run Ralph for the benefit of the people who worked there, although I am not sure what I meant by that.
There was a back way out – some stairs or a fire escape – then the hot bowels of the Windsor Hotel. It was a portentous start to life as an editor. The job had obviously gone to Old Mark, not the new model. I do not know how I got home, and I woke up with a hole in my head the size of the evening. The following Monday, I came to work for the first time, and introduced myself to all the same people again.
By the time I arrived, the magazine already had a history, the usual legends of creation and expulsion, its own pantheon and demonology. The good Seddo had been thrown out of the Garden of Eden. The great days of lunchtime drinking were gone. The powers of darkness ruled.
Ralph was bordered by Dolly to the west and hemmed in on two sides by Computer Publications. It occupied an undesigned area that had grown up like a shanty town. It was fenced off from the siege of technical magazines by thin partitioning like the walls around the cubicles in the toilets. The editor’s office was a windowed cube in the right-hand corner, with a desk on which Seddo had arranged an ‘in-basket’ an ‘out-basket’ and – brilliantly – a ‘too-hard-basket’. ‘In’ and ‘out’ embraced small collections of innocuous documents, a couple of promising stories and some inter-office envelopes. ‘Too-hard’ contained a mound of manuscripts speculatively submitted by every member of Australia’s trouser-soiling tribes of spittle-splattering, trolley-pushing, newspaper-collecting, street-screaming mentally ill, and a few people who were just stupid. Most favoured the opinion column as their means of self-expression.
The worst of them often offered themselves as regular columnists, feeling sure they represented the normal bloke’s point of view on a range of issues stretching from why women are the rape-crying, cock-teasing, ball-breaking, child-stealing, alimony-grabbing, fun-hating rulers of the world, to why straight men are the well-intentioned, misunderstood, discriminated against, emasculated and ultimately endangered sex.
I watched my staff through the glass that separated us. They seemed to have been chosen to represent every male body form in the world. There was fat Danny, slim Chris, movie-star perfect Monster, short, nuggety Dom, mountainous Ash, athletic Alex and chubby James. It was as if I were Noah, chosen by God to save one specimen of each of the ectomorphs, the endomorphs, the mesomorphs and every other kind of morph. Together, we would build a big boat and survive a great flood, at the end of which we would repopulate the world with the full range of physical types, using the only woman, cute little Amanda, the editorial assistant from the country town of Trundle, NSW.
It was an unpromising beginning to my ongoing analysis of the Ralph office. Many of the problems faced by magazines arise because the editor believes they are chosen by God.
Brad took me out to lunch at the Tex-Mex tangle of Arizonas, the kind of insipid theme restaurant where administration staff hold their Christmas parties. I told him I did not drink during the day, and recited the story about waking up in Wales and changing my ways, my personal myth of damnation and redemption.
Like Typesetting Bob, Brad did not fully approve of workers who would not drink at lunchtime, but he allowed me to sit with my chemical bombs of Diet Coke while he sipped chardonnay. It was a time of sadness and satisfaction for Brad. With Naylor’s resignation, he had risen from sub-editor to editor-in-chief of the P-mags in less than four years. In Ralph, he had a ‘clean’ mass-market title for the first time, but he had been caught between obedience to his boss, Nick, and loyalty to his protégé, Seddo, when each despised the other and neither had the solution to Ralph’s problems. Brad knew the magazine was sick, but did not know how to make it well.
He told me what he thought I needed to know about the staff. Art director Chriso, he said, was Seddo’s best friend in the world, and Amanda, on whom the future of the human race depended, was also a great Seddo loyalist. I would never win over either of them. Somebody else had stolen something from their last workplace, another would go whichever way the wind blew, a couple of the boys were just ‘weird’. I asked why he was telling me this. Obliquely, he replied that I was the new bloke in the village and he was showing me where the dunny was.
I went back to the dunny, puzzled and buzzing with phenylalanine, and one by one I invited the staff into my office, to tell me about their jobs. I explained my plans, and they sat there thinking, ‘Who is this idiot with the shiny head?’ and ‘I wonder if he’ll give me a pay rise.’
The advertising sales guys shared the office with editorial. They were friendly, relaxed blokes, but they could not sell ads in Ralph, and soon they were gone.
Tim Scott quickly disappeared to edit The Picture. I promoted the features editor to deputy editor, because I did not need a features editor. I did not need a deputy either, so he left.
I plundered the too-hard-basket with horror and awe. I felt the way real boxers must have felt when watching me spar. How could anybody be so shit at something so simple? I ran a competition to find the worst freelance story, and to print the winner in Ralph. The entries were far better than the rubbish people had sent in.
One would-be columnist from Western Australia rang me to ask what I thought of his turgid, sexist, redneck manifesto, in which he claimed straight white males were regularly passed over for jobs in favour of minority candidates. I looked around my office of straight (if odd-shaped) white males, in a building where almost everybody was white and straight, and I asked him if this was really a problem for him.
There were lots of columns in the early issues of Ralph. I discontinued them all. There would be no more opinions – not even mine.
I started at Ralph in March 1998. The issue on the stands was a bumper, 162-page number, with Emma Harrison on the cover. They had been forced to publish a magazine that went on sale for six weeks, because Ralph had missed so many print deadlines and was in danger of losing a month from its schedule. The big issue was also intended to go up against the launch issue of Australian FHM. Previously, Ralph had had one small, poorly funded, amateurish competitor, Next Media’s Max. Now it was up against a huge, rich, clever, proven professional product.
There was a buzz around men’s magazines. Todd had come back from Melbourne to edit Men’s Health, a very successful US title, the Australian licence to which had been bought by Rupert Murdoch’s nephew, Matt Handbury, of Murdoch Magazines. He started a couple of weeks before I did, and we were both asked to go on The Midday Show with Kerri-Anne Kennerley. Neil Ridgeway, the editor of FHM, would be there, too. I would rather hammer a nail into a rock with my eye than appear on television. I would rather drink sewage. I asked Cosmopolitan’s fashion editor – who had just begun working for Ralph on the side – to borrow some trendy clothes for me, so I would look like a men’s magazine editor.
He found a yellow jacket and tight black trousers, a look that never took off in the wider community. Worse, the day before I was asked to do the show, a barber botched up my $10 haircut and I told him to shave it all off, so I went to the studio with a number-two crop, looking like a bald bumblebee.
ACP hastily arranged an afternoon’s media training for me. I was told to look at the camera, exaggerate my gestures, and speak with my hands. I was full of dread. When I was in junior school, I used to spend the whole year fearing the Christmas play, desperately hoping it would be about the birth of Jesus so the Jewish kid
s would not have be involved. The Midday Show was like a nationally transmitted school play, complete with ridiculous costume but without a script.
Neil turned up at the studios with his marketing manager, which showed the enormous difference between FHM’s marketing and Ralph’s. Ridgeway, a handsome, well-presented surfer and a former editor of Tracks, was faintly suspicious of Todd and me, concerned initially to keep some professional distance. Channel 10’s make-up artists brushed our faces with foundation, as we all made limp jokes about the green room. Just before we went on, Ridgeway’s (attractive, female) marketing manager gave him a big hug for good luck; (attractive, male) Todd and I hugged each other.
Kerri-Anne Kennerley was a friendly, reassuring person with an ordinary-sized mouth. She sat us on a row of stools, like fairground prizes to be shot off our perches with air rifles. I told her I was nervous, she said everything was going to be alright. When the cameras were turned on, Kennerley suddenly became larger, louder and much more frightening, and her mouth grew bigger than her head.
She held up the Maypril cover of Ralph, showing Emma Harrison and her impossible breasts. The coverline was ‘Emmaaah!’ Kennerley turned to me and said, ‘Emmaaah!’, her mouth now wider than the studio, larger than the world, huger even than Emma Harrison’s breasts. I thought she was going to bite me.
She asked me what ‘Emmaaah!’ meant. I mumbled that I did not think it was supposed to be said out loud, and that was my contribution to the three-minute segment. Afterwards, Neil, Todd and I went to the Glasgow Arms in Ultimo, and got very drunk.
The ‘Emmaaah!’ issue was the best Ralph yet, and it sold almost as well as the first one. It worked because it was a thick, perfect-bound magazine with a famous, big-breasted blonde on the cover. A bonus pamphlet was glued onto the back, featuring ‘TV’s 12 Hottest Babes’. The design was cleaner and classier-looking than earlier issues, and – because there were still hardly any ads – the magazine was packed with information. Sadly, Barry Crocker appeared again in the fashion pages, this time dressed as an AFL player. Just as no young bloke has ever looked to a stickman to tell him what to read, I do not believe any Ralph readers sought out Barry Crocker for tips on how to dress.