by Mark Dapin
Everybody thought the interview appeared in Ralph, not Max, and even C-grade male celebrities like Brooks became wary of talking to us. Max was published until October 1999, when it bowed out with an issue featuring two unknown models on the cover, dressed in footy gear, and interviewed about football, a sport that neither of them followed.
Another of our early competitors was GQ Australia, which modelled itself in part on the AFR Magazine but broke the Fourth Immutable Rule of Magazine Publishing: it did not supply a service. It gave the reader little he could not find in a newspaper – little humour, little sex, and nothing to fantasise about but clothes. Advertisers loved it, because in doing little, it did little to offend. GQ number one was an astonishing 196 pages, supported by every major fashion advertiser. The content was the same as every other men’s magazine, and, indeed, every other men’s magazine ever: there was a story about a bouncer, about lesbian fantasies, about Muhammad Ali, about the porn industry in Canberra.
Dead GQ walked for eighteen months before Australia’s notoriously astute media buyers noticed they were shovelling their clients’ money into a grave. Editor Peter Holder had the horribly difficult job of trying to produce a magazine that was more up-market than the rest but he was playing the same cards reshuffled as if they were a different hand. Writers who had served time in the P-mags were almost as likely to appear in GQ as in Ralph. Peter himself had worked for four years at People. His deputy, Fred Pawle, had been a sub on The Picture (and was to be again). His contributors included Roger Crosthwaite, a sub on The Picture (and Ralph contributor), sometime The Picture sub (and sometime Ralph contributor) Jeremy Chunn, former People editor (and Ralph contributor) Pete Olszewski, and a former Picture sub writing under the pen-name ‘Cheeseman’. The irrational lampoon of the P-mags was an academy (and an animal house, and a summer vacation) for these funny, talented journalists, who could write for the trailer parks or the yuppie waterfront – but nearly every men's magazine was being put together from a single pool of staff.
When Peter used women on the cover, they had to be ‘classier’ than those in Ralph and FHM, but the field was strictly limited. Media heir Lachlan Murdoch’s wife Sarah O’Hare appeared on two GQ covers, and media heir James Packer’s ex-girlfriend Kate Fisher on another. After that, Australia was out of media heirs with supermodel girlfriends. Pete had promised to quit if his vision failed, and he left when GQ went bi-monthly in 1999. The magazine lurched on for two more issues, then collapsed. Several issues had sold fewer than 10 000 copies.
Men’s Health was edited by my mate Todd. The magazine had been running since October 1997, but Todd took it over a few weeks before I came to Ralph, in 1998. Todd was yet another men’s lifestyle magazine editor who had come up from Penthouse. With Greg Hunter at Inside Sport, and me at Ralph, Phil Abraham’s prodigies were now running more than half the market. (The editor-in-chief of FHM was Andrew Cowell, another former Penthouse editor.)
Until very recently, every cover of Men’s Health featured a black-and-white photograph of a bare-chested male model. Todd estimated the readership breakdown as one-third straight men, one-third straight women, and one-third gay men, but that probably gives bigger numbers to women and smaller numbers to gays.
Todd battled to maintain the heterosexuality of the magazine, in the face of criticism – and even the occasional threat – from the gay community. Men’s Health often had a higher female nipple count than Ralph, but it had the media buyers in its hip pocket. Even more than GQ, this was their magazine; there was not an advertiser in the country who could suffer from associations with health and fitness.
Men’s Health was the anti-Ralph, loved by advertisers and avoided by young, straight males. The only thing the two magazines had in common was idiotic launch advertising drives. Men’s Health’s campaign was seen by fewer people, since it was decided to run it in cinemas in metropolitan areas, rather than on television. It did occasionally surface on TV later, in a compilation show of the world’s funniest commercials. It showed three actors in a bar, talking about their penises the way men never do. One said, ‘I call mine Mr Wimpy.’ His friend replied, ‘I don’t have a name for mine.’ The third said, ‘I call mine Thor,’ and leaped onto the bar, waving his arms and shouting, ‘Mine is a white spear of energy!’ and thrusting his hips at the air. The drinkers around him cheered him on – rather than breaking glasses over his head – the screen faded to black, and the words ‘Men’s Health’ appeared. Anybody who had come to the cinema to watch Nightmare on Elm Street 3 would have left believing there was a new magazine about penis names.
Ralph’s only real adversary was FHM. We were two fighters of the same weight, height and reach, but one of us had chosen a horribly unfortunate ringname. Like Men’s Health, FHM was a very clever magazine, and everything in it had been tested and refined, every accidental discovery turned into a maxim. It had a way of photographing women, a way of writing captions, and a framework that dictated every story had to be ‘funny, sexy, useful’. If it was only two out of the three, an FHM editor was expected to add the third ingredient.
FHM’s UK publishers, EMAP, had bought Australian Playboy publisher Mason Stewart. (EMAP continued to pump out Playboy until 1999, then folded the magazine when sales regularly dropped below 25 000). They then proceeded to make with FHM the same mistakes that Mason Stewart had made with Playboy. It is as if companies cannot learn, as if management spend so much time engaged in evasions and justifications, they come to believe them themselves. Playboy’s staff had always been told it was a good idea – not just a cheap one – to use US material, and FHM was now told it was a good idea to take advantage of the tremendous resources offered by EMAP UK.
It was true that Neil could buy a £1500 shoot of an international celebrity for £500, and not have to go through the months of negotiation and disappointment each time. He could use FHM’s international name and expertise to get models for the Australian edition. He could makes promises he could sometimes keep – FHM would photograph them more professionally than Ralph; FHM could offer them the chance of appearing in its international editions. FHM boasted it never paid its cover girls, but I suspect this was only technically true.
FHM’s British connection was also a handicap, however. It meant Neil ran vast amounts of material from the UK, which made FHM seem like an English magazine. Often, staff did not so much Australianise material as internationalise it; they simply cut out any reference to where the people in its stories might be from. In their photographs, however, they looked too pale, too fat, too short-haired, too fashionably dressed to be Australian. EMAP stopped shipping the UK edition to Australia within weeks of the launch of Australian FHM, but airfreighted copies were still available in newsagents. Readers only had to compare the two editions to see they were being strung along. In an attempt to save costs and maximise profits, EMAP left Australian FHM editorial ridiculously understaffed. For years, the magazine did not even have a dedicated sub-editor. These two factors gave Ralph its only advantage – the ability to be Australian – just as they had helped Penthouse over Playboy a decade or so before.
FHM was launched with a good-natured, self-deprecating TV ad campaign, which was broadcast in both Australia and New Zealand. Marketing was one of FHM’s great strengths. Anything the magazine did got into the press, because EMAP’s marketing people made sure that happened. FHM’s ‘100 Sexiest Women’ had a credibility that Ralph’s list never had, because it was supposedly decided by a poll of all the FHM readers in the world, and not just me and Chriso. This was an unusual claim to make, since every international edition came up with a different list. While the Australian Top Ten might have been the same as the UK Top Ten, the back sixty contained many more Australian girls.
FHM’s most successful early covers featured Shania Twain, Tania Zaetta, Katrina Warren and Nicola Charles. The Water Rats cover, which caused me so much pain, was a failure. Neil was offered a $1000 bonus if he could get newsreader Sandra Sully, model Kate Fisher or
a certain female politician in the magazine. He succeeded with Fisher, and had the politician flirting on the phone, but then John Howard called an election and she pulled away.
I drank with Neil on the day of our TV appearance with Todd, and again with him and Carl at an evening I organised when Carl was still at Max and Max was still a competitor. We talked guardedly about the things we had in common, but never fully admitted the crushing pressure we were all under. Neil later told me that he had burst into tears in the street one night because of the strain.
Ralph did not have a cover for the November 1998 issue, so I invented a celebrity. Anna Kournikova had been appointed our ‘Sexiest Woman in the World’, but she and Liz Hurley were not answering our calls, and their agents had suggested our time might be more profitably spent jumping out of tall buildings or throwing ourselves in front of cars. We had called up every female star on the A list, the B list and the C list. They were all busy washing their hair, polishing their nails, or climbing the highest mountain in Africa. The only list I had left was the shopping list Claire had given me. I was about to start ringing around potatoes (2 kg), apples (green not red) and bread rolls (wholemeal), to ask if they would pose in a bikini, when I looked at some pictures of Samantha Frost. The Samantha Frost. Samantha Frost was a part-time model who had appeared in the newspapers wearing swimwear at a Fashion Week parade. She was an approachably glamorous brunette, and we had a photo shoot of her standing apparently topless, and glancing coyly over her shoulder. Was Samatha Frost, we asked, Australia’s next supermodel? A fair answer would have been, ‘Er. . . no, probably not,’ but we put her on the cover, and declared that her career – like her top – was ‘Taking off’.
After Samantha Frost, we realised we could sell without stars. We invented other celebrities, including two-times cover girl Marea Lambert-Barker, and eventually came up with our own type of celebrity – the winner of Ralph’s quest for ‘Australia’s Sexiest Model’. We could carry the nobodies because we were funny.
We hassled everyone we spoke to. When we interviewed ventriloquist David Strassman, we would only speak to his dummy. We called euthanasia campaigner Philip Nitschke, and repeatedly asked him to help us kill ourselves. We tested the limits of nominative determinism, using a format stolen, I think, from UK Arena. We rang people with religious-sounding names and asked if they believed in God. Gloriously, Mr Jesus of Barrack Heights, NSW, said yes. Ms Pagan of Kingsford, NSW, said no.
We had to address people in a different way to the newspapers. If we asked the same sorry questions we would receive the same sorry answers. Stars like to give interviews only when they have something to sell – a new CD, a TV show or a movie – so everybody gets them at the same time. I tried to break us out of the publicist-driven cycle, and call people whenever we thought about it. It worked well with sportsmen, and hardly at all with film actors.
There was another reason for our friendly, jokey tone. No drunk ever met a stranger in the pub and asked, ‘What are your musical influences?’ or ‘Tell me how you came up with the title for your latest release?’ It is far better to follow your own inebriated agenda and demand, ‘How important is the Hubble space telescope to understanding the origins of the universe?’
The Trading Post became a rich source of victims. We found somebody selling a ‘Linda Evangelista Walker’, a type of treadmill, and treated the listing as though it was a job ad. We rang and asked ‘How often would I have to walk Linda?’
I sent Owen ‘dog man’ Thomson to the annual Elvis festival in the NSW country town of Parkes, which was supposedly swamped by hordes of Elvis impersonators from all over the country, gathered to celebrate the memory of the King.
‘Maybe I should go dressed as Elvis,’ suggested Owen.
‘Maybe you should go as the worst Elvis there has ever been,’ I said.
Owen knew no Elvis songs and could not sing. Nor did he look anything like Elvis. He hired an all-white, one-piece Elvis jumpsuit, two sizes too small, along with a questionable wig and fake-rhinestone encrusted belt. Fifty Elvises were expected at Parkes. Only sixteen turned up, including Owen. The other fifteen treated him with contempt.
‘What would you say if I told you I was the real Elvis?’ Owen asked Elvis Motel.
‘Is this going to take long, or what?’ replied Motel.
‘No,’ said Owen.
‘Well, I wouldn’t believe you,’ said Motel. ‘You’re the worst Elvis I’ve ever seen.’
‘Then why are you impersonating me?’ demanded Owen.
An important new column in Ralph was ‘Penguinwatch’, in which the readers were kept in touch with new developments in the world of penguins, of which there were generally none. The very funny Tony Lambert pitched me a tired story called ‘What your dog says about you’. I said I would take it if he changed it to ‘What your penguin says about you’.
Tony made the macaroni penguin ‘the penguin of choice for the sleek urban professional’. Of the Gentoo penguin owner, he wrote, ‘Like your penguin – who appears to wear a bonnet – you like hats.’
The readers were at first confounded by the penguins, which multiplied like penguins to appear throughout the magazine. A giant, inflatable penguin (an emperor, I believe) stood almost hidden in the background of a fashion shoot, and was mobbed by half-naked, nubile Babes Behaving Badly. We ran numerous items about how to care for your penguin in difficult situations, and the animals were eventually embraced by Ralph fans like women who pick up women in nightclubs for threesomes with their boyfriends.
People assumed I had an obsession with penguins, when I had never given them any thought in my life. My staff started to offer me gifts of plastic penguin toys, and talk to me about Arctic birds as if I gave a fuck. Even I came to believe I was somehow interested in them, and when Claire and I went to see her sister in Melbourne, I insisted we all drive to Phillip Island to check out the penguin parade at the beach at dusk. We watched dozens of little penguins either go into the water or come out of it – I can’t remember which – then sat through a penguin-life-cycle presentation at the visitor centre. About five minutes into the lecture I thought, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ and I knew then that Ralph had taken over my life.
The distinction between magazine and me continued to blur. Wouldbe contributors and readers alike rang up and asked to speak to ‘Ralph’. Even when I told them my name, they would often lapse into calling me Ralph later in the conversation. Sometimes, I even felt like Ralph.
I loved magazines, from the feeling of gloss paper under my thumb to the smell of freshly printed stock rolling through the presses. I loved typography, photography and illustration (in that order). Most of all, I loved the English language, and the way it can be made to twist and bend without breaking. You never have to say ‘envision’ when the word you mean is vision.
Men’s lifestyle magazines have to be fashionable, and they have to contain fashion – whether the readers like it or not. The fashion in men’s magazines legitimises the glamour. It allows men to say to their girlfriends, ‘My magazine’s the same as yours. I only buy it for the, er, clothes.’ It also forces the magazine to look good, to look trendy, to look young, because fashion changes every season. Without fashion editorial, there is no fashion advertising, and without fashion advertising, there is no fragrance advertising, and without fashion and fragrance advertising, there is not much left for men’s magazines apart from tinea creams and escort services.
In April 1999, I raised the fashion page count from six to twenty-two. Nick initially objected to the larger section on the grounds that it was ‘expensive journalism’ (it was not) and I expected a tsunami of homophobic anger from the readers, but after the first issue, I did not receive a single complaint.
To begin with, we used real people in street situations: a fighter from the Boxing Works gym posed as a nightclub bouncer, modelling leather jackets; a guy from the production department standing before a judge, dressed in a suit. I conceived and cast the early pages a
s dark, gritty and tough.
Those first shoots introduced me to the pleasure of watching my words become pictures, of seeing the photos in my head become the photos on a page. I described the look and the feel I wanted, and Chriso produced it, as if through my eyes. It was like watching my own screenplay come to life in the cinema (at least, I guessed it was – my screenplay was still pacing up and down outside a producer’s door, sweating and smoking cigarettes) with the words spoken exactly how I had intended. It was like suddenly finding the ability to paint.
While I was making the magazine funnier and more stylish, Brad was pressing me to make it sexier, by adding more pictures of girls.
‘Should we give the readers more of what they like?’ he asked. ‘Or less?’
There are Ten Immutable Rules of Magazine Publishing. Rule Number Seven is: When in Doubt, Consider Brad’s Rhetorical Question. I considered it, and began to run more photographs of women in underwear. Brad knew most magazines are for the readers. In none of the dozens of meetings I attended did anyone from any other department ask, ‘What about the readers?’ any more than executives at a tobacco company might ask, ‘What about the smokers?’ There seemed to be a corporate feeling that our jobs were about fooling the readers into buying something they did not want or need.
What drives middle managers, the lords of rotten boroughs, the sheriffs of nothing? Were they sustained through their schooldays by dreams of homogenisation, obfuscation and the triumph of the insipid? The worst of them inhabit a syntactically unthinking universe, where ideas are objects you can ‘pick up and run with’ and a ‘ballpark figure’ is any number they want it to be. They shackle, brace and cripple language, when they could be making words dance. They are sorry products of corrupt fashions in corporate ‘thinking’. When the marketing manager was called the ‘marketing’ manager, it was obvious they were supposed to manage the marketing of the product. Now they are all brand managers – and what exactly does a brand manager do? How do you ‘manage’ a ‘brand’? There is endless potential to fudge responsibilities, to seek promotion, to do nothing.