Sex & Money

by Mark Dapin

  Brad flew to London, and left me as acting publisher of Ralph and the P-mags for five weeks. The P-mags, he assured me, would take care of themselves. I was to concentrate on ‘fixing’ Ralph. They did not quite take care of themselves, however. Press releases about the ‘heal-to-crease’ controversy had been sent out, and Brad had flown to London, leaving me to handle the media. I had not known the issue existed – and, in fact, it practically did not. It was usually easy enough for the designer to choose pictures in which the inner labia were not visible. I was not going to go on TV to pretend to be angry about it, so I passed that job on to Carlee, who at least had labia.

  The easiest way to fix Ralph was to put Anna Kournikova on the cover. ‘Annawatch’ was still the best-loved page in the magazine. Hundreds of thousands of Australian men wondered what she looked like in her underwear, and many of them, it seemed, thought about little else. We had no chance of ever securing a shoot with Anna, whose ‘people’ were thought to hate the magazine, particularly as we had raised a petition to try to dissuade her from marrying her then fiancé, Sergei Federov. Ralph’s new ‘101 Sexiest Women’ issue (one woman more than FHM) was the best-selling issue of the year, so I decided Ralph should produce the ‘Book of Anna’, a 101 sexiest-women style tip-on where every one of the 101 women was Anna Kournikova.

  We called in every paparazzi shot of her, every tennis shot from every sports agency, every PR shot from every product she had endorsed. We separated them into categories, and made a full page out of ‘upskirt’ shots of her tennis knickers. It was my highest and lowest moment, when I embraced the basest instincts of the worst magazine buyers. I realised how much I had learned from Brad.

  None of the images was close to cover quality. We bought a paparazzi shot of her face – breaking every rule of men’s magazines by showing no flesh beyond cleavage in a dress – and retouched it more than anything we had retouched before, to make it seem like a studio portrait. We smoothed her skin to a shiny, golden brown, smoothed the highlights on her face, whitened her eyes and teeth, added colour to her lips and removed the bags from under her eyes. We added to the bottom of the picture to extend her cleavage, and moved her pupils to make it seem as though she was looking at the camera (sadly, this only worked with one eye out of the pair). We brightened the blue glow behind her. She no longer looked like a human being. We turned her into a flawless (except for her eyes) digitised Anna. Our ‘improved’ Anna was later used on a poster for the International Socialist Organisation (the Australian arm of the SWP) advertising a meeting about how the media manipulates women’s bodies.

  With Brad's blessing, I asked Marketing to book every available Metrolite. For the first time, we had a big, effective advertising campaign, a big product (magazine + free magazine), and a big name on the cover, all at once. The August 2000 edition of Ralph was halfway to being the Ralph every previous issue should have been. Massive early sales suggested we had under-printed, and I managed to convince our brilliant new production manager, Mark Hukins, to pump out an extra 20 000. We sold, in total, 122 799 copies: the best any men's lifestyle magazine had done to that date.

  I thought I was a genius. I thought I was God. I thought nothing could beat me. Then, a couple of weeks into our sale, Amanda told me the street posters outside the building had been removed. They had been taken down on behalf of our former publisher, Nick, by one of the people who had previously supported his contention that street posters did not work for magazines. They had replaced them with street posters for one of their own titles, Woman’s Day.

  I was furious beyond all expression. I did not trust myself to speak to the person concerned, so I asked to discuss it by email. At first, I was told the sites had been booked four months previously but somehow, mysteriously, the Woman’s Day booking had not shown up on the group marketing manager’s list. My correspondent took ‘full responsibility’, i.e. was not prepared to do anything about it. They asked me to appreciate it made sense ‘for the two sites to be part of [their] overall buy’. Then they asked me to ask myself, ‘Are two sites really effective in reaching critical mass?’ (This, from people who had previously claimed all street posters were a waste of money.)

  I said I found their replies insulting. My correspondent claimed a ‘soft spot’ for Ralph. I said I was tired of hearing about their ‘soft spot’. The last time they had mentioned it was when they had asked to use Ralph’s free movie-ticket tip-on for Cosmopolitan. They said they were tired of my emails. They tried to blame Amanda. The Woman’s Day poster stayed up, the Ralph posters stayed down.

  This episode changed the way I thought about work, and about people. I had always felt an imaginative sympathy for everybody else, an overriding conviction that we were – on some level – all the same. I did not feel the same as the people who had taken down my posters. I would not have done that. I could not have lived with the contradiction. If I wanted to do the best for my magazine, I would have to start behaving the way they did, as if nothing else mattered – and I did still think of Ralph as my magazine, and I realised I was back to stay. I dropped all pretence of a situationalist attitude to Ralph. I just wanted to make the best men’s magazine in the world, because I thought maybe I could. It was a tiny tremor in the history of Ralph, but an earthquake in my own life. I never spoke to Nick again, and one day he disappeared, so urgently drawn to pursue unspecified interests that he was gone before there was time to organise an official farewell. Seddo, meanwhile, was back at ACP, editing Street Machine, and laughing.

  I was given an office with Helen Vnuk’s husband, Dan Lennard and Glenn Smith. Dan, Glenn and I were Brad’s Special Projects team. My special project was Ralph, Dan’s was a series of one-shots and the Category 1 magazine Red Hot People, while Glenn’s was to redesign all sports magazines. We soon became a (very) small gang of mates, who all went to the pub together.

  I was officially made editor-in-chief of Ralph, and celebrated my new status by buying a good suit. Everyone thought I was a twat for wearing a suit. It looked incongruous when I stood drinking with the others in the pub, as if I had unaccountably wandered over from a group of stockbrokers to embarrass a bunch of skaters. Wherever I was, people assumed I was the bouncer. When I stood close to the entrance at the Edinburgh Castle hotel on Pitt Street, a queue formed in front of me and the leader inquired timidly if he could come in. The Good Suit needed regular maintenance. It was often in the drycleaners, as were my shirts, most of which were left over from the white-shirt shoot that appeared in the second issue of the Australian Financial Review Magazine.

  One morning I came in to my office and went to hang my shirts on the back of the door, but was left standing in an empty doorway, dangling them in the air like a sad, unfunny mime artist (in other words, like every mime artist who ever lived). First, I noticed the door handle was missing, then I realised the whole door was gone. Brad had given it to Jackie, the production woman, who had complained ‘people’ were mistaking her room for a corridor, because it did not have a door. This seemed unlikely, since anyone who really thought Jackie’s room was a corridor would have finished up walking out of the window, another victim of ACP’s alleged suicide promotion policy. Jackie had asked Brad for a door and, since I had never expressed a particularly strong feeling for or against doors, he figured I could do without one. The loss of the door made me feel that nothing in life was permanent, and one day I could arrive at work to discover there was no computer, no desk, no carpet. I began elaborately to praise my remaining furniture, to make clear how much I valued it. I paid the occasional sentimental visit to my old door in Jackie’s office, and once I even hung my shirts from it, for old time’s sake.

  Brad’s fiefdom was an island of sanity in an ocean of madmen’s saliva. We appointed our own brand manager, and prevented him from developing sectional interests. We worked with our own, brilliant circulation manager. A new credo of honesty and efficiency was adopted in meetings – which were kept to a minimum – along with plates of strawberries and
tiny, cute fruit muffins of the type elves might favour. It became less popular so say ‘top of mind’, although Brad had developed an alarming tendency to ask for ‘marquee names’.

  We started to fix Ralph by making it bigger. Magazines generally go up in size when they carry more advertising. They are fatter towards the end of the year than at the beginning, because advertisers promote their products more heavily at Christmas. An average issue of FHM was now as fat as a Christmas issue of Ralph. Our advertising targets had been set too low. I could not increase the advertising targets, since they had been set, along with the advertising staff’s bonuses, at the start of the financial year. If we changed them, we would be messing with the very fabric of the universe, we would rend a hole in the space–time continuum, and probably all get thrown back to the nineteenth century, where we would inadvertently murder our great-grandparents and thus ensure that we would never be born. I could, however, alter the calculation on which the magazine size was based. Brad sent Jeanette, the new financial analyst, to investigate its origins, and she discovered it had been invented many years ago by somebody at the Australian Women’s Weekly, who had based his figures not on some rising scale of profitability, but on ‘instinct’.

  My instinct differed from his instinct, and Ralph began to grow like a model’s breasts under an airbrush. Many people in the company liked to cling to the idea that the Australian market was not accepting the men’s lifestyle category at the same speed as the UK or the US – partly to give credence to their spurious claims of some particular local expertise – but the fact was FHM UK was more than 300 pages thick. If Ralph could produce a 300-page magazine, instead of pseudo-economical stick-thin 164-page editions, we would wipe out the competition and double our sales. In corporate Australia, however, that level of investment is reserved for idiotic marketing initiatives, or the expense accounts of kleptocratic executives. It is inconceivable to spend money to increase market share by greatly improving the product. Nevertheless, Brad gave me another sixteen pages, then another thirty-two.

  Meanwhile, other people were pretending to be angry with Ralph. An organisation called Suicide Australia, which sounded like a body set up to encourage people to kill themselves, had complained about a fashion shoot in which we showed men dressed in business suits apparently jumping off skyscrapers. It was supposed to be a parody of the cartoon image of tycoons leaping to their death after a stock market crash, but Suicide Australia claimed to believe it glamorised youth suicide. The organisation demanded an apology, and that we should print an article condemning suicide. There was an implication that they would write to our advertisers and warn them not to buy space in the magazine – since anyone who bought their products would, presumably, kill themselves. There was a letter enclosed from a South Australian Green MP, supporting Suicide Australia’s contention that Ralph was sensationalist, crass, and potentially fatal.

  I knew suicide like a friend. When we were young, Merv gassed himself and Dave threw himself from a tower block window. Another mate had hung himself a couple of years earlier. Months ago, my sister’s boyfriend had choked on the fumes of his own car. I spent hundreds of mornings imagining pressing a pistol to my head, slicing a knife through my veins, or jumping – yes, jumping – and dying before I hit the ground.

  I was not encouraged by pictures in magazines. The idea was ludicrous and patronising and sick, like the parents who blame their children’s deaths on Black Sabbath records. It strips life of all its value if you believe somebody can pick up a magazine, turn to the fashion spread and think, ‘Hey, that looks cool. I think I’ll give it a try.’

  I wrote to the organisation and the MP asking them how they dared accuse me of encouraging people to kill themselves – and, incidentally, what commercial purpose they imagined that might serve. I bravely put Carlee on the news to argue my point. Carlee apologised to anyone who was distressed by the pictures, but not to Suicide Australia, which led the organisation to claim Ralph was one of the few unrepentant media outlets it had ever approached. When I received no reply from the MP, I wrote again, asking how she had the nerve to waste my time like this. I never heard from her. She was too busy blaming other things on the media.

  When the sports magazines – which had previously been in Epping – joined us in Castlereagh Street, Brad moved me to an office in the same space as Rugby League Week. I was supposed to be group editor-in-chief, and I trained up a couple of people on Pro Basketball Today, but I was not much help beyond that. I did not know about Rugby League, I knew about magazines. I was as handy to have around as somebody who did not know about magazines but knew about accounting.

  Eventually I got my old job back, and took an office in Ralph. I had told Carl I would not, but I did. Carl was moved sideways to work on Emergency, a launch idea that never happened, and I was both editor-in-chief and editor of Ralph. We had a new chief sub, Elisabeth, and she acquired a new sub, Ivan. She acquired him in the way both a chief sub-editor acquires a sub and a dominatrix acquires a sub. Ivan did her bidding – in fact, he did everyone’s bidding – got whipped for his pains, and enjoyed it.

  Ivan was an inveterate chuckler, a big cheesy grinner, an unconscious gurner and a great bloke to have around. He lightened the mood in the office when everyone was sad that Carl had been moved. He was fantastically enthusiastic, thrilled to be working on a mainstream men’s magazine when previously he had edited a trade publication for the double glazing industry. He was a man whose face God had left incomplete, knowing – in his famously infinite wisdom – that Ivan’s parents would quickly finish the job with a fetching pair of spectacles.

  Ralph, like all magazines, was full of errors, so I invented Eric the workie to take responsibility for them. If a spelling mistake went through, or the pages were not numbered consecutively, or a photograph was miscaptioned, it was always the fault of our hapless work experience boy, who had turned his misnamed ‘talents’ to another area of production. I needed a picture of Eric, so I chose the ageless Ivan. At first, he appeared wearing his glasses, but the second time he was photographed with his contact lenses in place, and he looked like a vole. He also looked less incompetent. I had the artists graffiti a huge pair of floating spectacles over his face, in the great schoolboy tradition of textbook desecration. From then on, every time Eric appeared, he wore the same pair of massive drawn-on glasses.

  As always, I got carried away with this effect, and began drawing glasses on fashion models, the Doner, anything. We invented a new script font, ‘Eric Casual’, with which to caption Eric’s adventures. FHM thought Eric was ridiculous. Other journalists in the company could not understand why we were wasting pages of a men’s lifestyle magazine scribbling on an idiot, when we could be pointing out that the music of the band You Am I was derived from an eclectic cocktail of influences including The Clash, Cold Chisel, The Jam and The Sports, or celebrating the cinematic achievements of Francis Ford Coppola. The readers knew, however. The little boys understood. We were saying, ‘Look, we’re just like you. We think it’s funny to draw a cock in the mouth of Isaac Newton in your physics textbook, too.’

  Once again, I became entranced by my magazine, the people who worked there, and the terrifying energies it generated. I preferred being at work to being at home, where all I did was compose impossible lists of things to do, and plan the murder of my corporate foes. (Could I make it look like suicide? Maybe I could fool one of them into killing the other . . .)

  I found excuses to visit the office at weekends, and sat at my desk answering emails. I was rarely alone. Dom had always worked a seven-day week. Amanda was usually packaging returns in the fashion office, and Elisabeth regularly rode to work on her bizarrely customised bicycle, to finish proofs she had been unable to complete during the week because she needed to spend the greater part of the day reprimanding Ivan. I often saw my staff seven days a week – every day of the year, except holidays. So, in August, I went on holiday with them.

  Chriso and his girlfriend Fi, Claire
and I, Ash, a couple of photographers, and door-stealing Jackie and her boyfriend drove down to Falls Creek, for a week in the snow.

  We shared a large apartment, cooked together, drank together, sat watching skateboard videos together, and tried hard not to talk about Ralph.

  I was the only person who could not ski, although most people chose to snowboard. I went onto the slopes with Claire and Fi, who urged me to just sort of stand with my legs apart and sail down the hill. After I stacked for the eighth time in twenty-five minutes, I realised I was not going to be able to teach myself to ski. I had fallen forwards, backwards and to both sides. I had landed on my wrists, my arms, my knees, my thighs and my shoulders. There were no new ways to fall. I asked Fi what I could do to improve my technique.

  ‘Stop crashing into things,’ she said.

  I was battling the terrifyingly named ‘Wombat’s Ramble’, a gentle beginners’ run that meandered down to our chalet. Swarms of five year olds whizzed past my wriggling legs as I kicked at the air like an upended cockroach choking on Mortein. I gave up. I tucked my skis under my arm, dropped them, tucked them under my other arm, dropped them again, swore, and stomped home through the snow in my ludicrously uncomfortable plastic boots. I caught the chairlift back to the top of Wombat’s Ramble, almost blinded a Japanese guy with my ski pole, nearly face-planted Claire as I wrenched myself out of the still-moving seat, and enrolled in ski school.