by Mark Dapin
In fact, he never mentioned it again.
THIRTEEN In which Eric does not lose his
virginity to Yvonne, but I lose my temper
with New Zealand, and jack it in for good
There are Ten Immutable Rules of Magazine Publishing. Number Nine is: Writers Who Adopt Alter Egos Eventually Grow into Them. Ivan quickly became identified with Eric – in everybody else’s mind if not his own. Even though he was a solid, diligent, talented worker, I began to believe he was a gibbering incompetent. Brad never referred to him as anything other than ‘Eric the workie’, and I found it increasingly difficult to think of him as Ivan. Sometimes when I looked at him, I would become unreasonably irritated by the fact he was not wearing drawn-on glasses.
The readers enjoyed Eric. They liked to heckle, rankle and bully him. They suggested additional things for which to blame him, and even held him responsible for problems in their own workplaces. In their schoolboy hearts, they would have liked to drag him down to the toilet block and show him the blue fish in the lavatory.
Yvonne Firmin was their true love. They dreamed of taking her hand, leading her behind the bike sheds, and marching their fingers up her skirt. Yvonne was the last in a short line of women writing about sex in Ralph. The first was feminist academic Catharine Lumby, who produced a series of concise, literate, funny columns aimed at showing men how women might feel about fighting, oral sex and checking out men’s bodies. Catharine was in a strange position in that she was a serious writer and thinker, and the readers wanted to know when she last gave a blow job, and did she swallow? She was very sporting, but I think quite relieved when she was offered a column in the Bulletin and had to give up Ralph. Next, I gave the column to my friend Madeleine, and asked her to make it more of a diary of her own sex life. Unfortunately, Madeleine did not have a sex life, so her writing was permeated by a sad, flirtatious yearning, and every coitus was interrupted before it began. While I was away, Carl found the woman who signed herself as Yvonne. In some ways, the real Yvonne was our readers’ fantasy girl. She loved cars, drove an old Chrysler Valiant, and had its marque tattooed on her body. She went to the Crusty Demons motorcycle stunt-riding show. She was a rock chick with a bigger CD collection than anyone in the office (except, perhaps, Carl); she preferred tradesmen to college boys; and she had worked in porn (at Penthouse under Phil Abraham).
She was also a fine writer with a taste in books that ranged from Alberto Manguel through Carson McCullers to Malcolm Lowry (Yvonne Firmin is named for a character from Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano). This aspect of her character did not translate to Yvonne, who was too busy having sex to read anything but the instructions on the back of a condom wrapper (which she knew by heart, anyway). Yvonne’s earliest columns were confused by conflicting expectations. Carl felt they should be funny; Brad that they should be instructional. In the era of Bridget Jones, I was convinced they should be diarised. Yvonne would be the ultimate Babe Behaving Badly, a promiscuous, bisexual, blonde, stacked and shaved Bridget, twenty-three, who did not want to get married.
If Yvonne was in a relationship, she would base the columns on her life. If she was between blokes – as it were – she would look to something in the past that she had either heard about or done. Her style was part-journalism, part-Forum Letter, and part-intimate-phone-call-to-a-best-girlfriend. As soon as the readers got to know her, they began writing in and asking her questions about sex and relationships. They had three major queries: Is my penis big enough? Do I go on long enough? What is the best way to make a woman come? They always wanted to know how to turn friends who were girls into girlfriends, and were puzzled when it did not happen.
Yvonne attracted readers’ wolf whistles when she was a strong, independent woman talking dirty, but as the writer built her personality, gave her vulnerabilities and regrets, the readers hugged her to their chests and cried. They sent her long, emotional letters about how they had just got divorced, and now they were with somebody else, and they were worried what the trauma might be doing to their children. They liked and trusted her. At first, the writer answered their emails, signed by Yvonne but from her heart, then it became impossible. When we printed Yvonne’s hotmail address at the foot of her column, she received 300 messages in a fortnight, crashing her machine. When she wrote a group email explaining why she could not respond personally, she received a barrage of ‘Fuck you, I knew you didn’t really exist’ messages in return. From the start, I wanted Yvonne to become a fully-fledged staff member. We had her in the publisher’s panel as ‘Sex Editor’ (Eric’s official position was ‘Virgin’). She wrote sex guide features, and eventually recommended her ‘Top 100 Sex Positions’. Briefly, it looked as if she might pop Eric’s cherry (we knew Eric wanted it).
Ralph changed rapidly in the latter half of 2000. We shot more ordinary Australian girls, and fumblingly tried to chat them up. I scattered pictures of pretty women everywhere, so the readers could follow them with their eyes, the way they watched sexy office workers in short skirts in the CBD. I dropped girls between the interviews and the movie reviews, the penguin stories and the how-to pages. I wanted the magazine to reflect the thought processes of a young, straight, Australian male. ‘What about that movie last night? Um, nice tits. What about the surf at Coogee? Um, nice tits. What about the new Powderfinger single? Um, nice arse.’ It was wry and funny and desperately horny.
I was always trying to figure out how we could be useful, how we could help the readers get what they wanted. I launched a flotilla of features in which Dave Smiedt collected tips (always in groups of 100, of course) about sex and relationships, from girls to men. I began regular, comprehensive – if optimistic – guides to the best pick-up joints in Australia. I brought in ‘Beach of the Month’, in which a photographer and a writer were sent to Coogee, Bondi or Surfer’s Paradise to take pictures of pretty girls in bikinis and ask what they were doing there, thinking like a man on the beach.
I started ‘Going Off’, in which a journalist was sent to a town or a suburb, given $200 and told to visit as many pubs as possible between 7.30 pm and closing time. They had to report on the talent, the atmosphere, any fights or funny stuff, and let the readers know where to find the prettiest girls. The worst towns were always the best. Carlee ‘went off’ in the desperately drab NSW military enclave of Singleton, and met a local who pulled down his trousers, showed her his arse, and asked if she wanted to see the gravy. This, apparently, was how they chatted up women in Singleton.
These stories grounded Ralph in truth. We were not offering FHM’s ice-cream faced England, we gave them Australia. We talked about bars they had been to; photographed girls they had spoken to; chatted with bouncers who had grabbed the drinks out of their hand. Every time we visited Newcastle, Wollongong or Geelong, we built a little extra trust.
During my first year at Ralph, when all that separated us from every other men’s lifestyle magazine was an inexplicable attraction to penguins and a stalker’s obsession with Anna Kournikova, a stupid person told me we made too many in-jokes, and were in danger of alienating readers. I realised then that we had to increase the number of in-jokes, to make the readers work a little to understand what was going on, and reward them with laughs the uninitiated could not share.
Owen Thompson and I invented Captain Stupid, the last honest man in the world. Captain Stupid took everything literally, believed every word he read in the paper, and acted on most of them. When I was working on the property pages of the Sydney Weekly, before I joined ACP, a real estate agent had advertised a house under the headline ‘Won’t Last’. I rang, quite guilelessly, to suggest they change the copy, since it implied the building might fall down. Like Monty Python’s Mr Smoketoomuch, the salesman could not see my point. His years of relentless lying had blinded him to the meaning of language.
When the nascent Captain Stupid saw an ad for ‘the only beachfront apartments remaining’ on the Gold Coast, he called and asked what happened to the rest of them. ‘I was up t
here a couple of months ago,’ he said, ‘and I could have sworn there were hundreds.’ He then called an ad headed ‘Broken Head’, the name of a seaside resort in northern NSW, and advised the advertiser to lie down and elevate her legs.
With Captain Stupid, we schematised our previously anarchic prank phone calls. Owen combed job ads and small ads, in the daily newspapers and – especially – in the Trading Post, tirelessly searching for the wrong end of the stick. We devised a different theme each month. For example, Captain Stupid might get it into his stupid head that he must confront supervillains such as the Savage Centurion, which turned out to be a five-metre fibreglass boat for sale. ‘Disguising yourself as a boat won’t fool me,’ Captain Stupid told the hapless advertiser, and demanded ‘a battle to determine the fate of the free world.’
‘No,’ said the advertiser.
‘Have you ever considered using your powers for good instead of evil?’ asked Captain Stupid.
‘Mate . . . you’re a fuckwit,’ said the Savage Centurion.
Captain Stupid’s sidekick, Supercat, was rarely seen. It was born after a Trading Post ad for ‘Supercat Converters’, a supplier of performance car exhaust components. The captain duly rang the number and asked if he could use the converter to convert his ordinary cat into a supercat. When he asked about X-ray vision, they said he had the wrong number.
Supercat was a fluffy white toy cat, dressed in a model’s bikini bottoms. It sat on a shelf in the office, looking oddly disturbing, until somebody locked it in a drawer. Its only outing came during the Captain Stupid photo shoot, for which we dressed Owen in a rented superhero costume, topped off with a pair of swimming goggles and a propeller hat, and photographed him around town with Supercat tucked under his arm. As soon as we left the building, Captain Stupid was approached by students collecting money for East Timor. We gave them a couple of dollars and celebrated the fantastic truth that, on the day of his birth, Captain Stupid had saved East Timor.
The Captain’s most incomprehensible venture came about when we discovered ‘Live Rock for Marine Tank’. Live rock is a form of decorative coral, but Captain Stupid firmly believed the ad was promoting a Live Aid-style, all-star international benefit concert in aid of fish tanks. Captain Stupid had no time for ambiguity, for language mangling, deceit or obfuscation. He was a tireless crusader for truth in advertising. More than that, however, he was a device to wind up innocent people whose only known crime was to advertise their second-hand goods in the Trading Post.
Owen was an editor’s dream of a freelance writer. Just as Carlee would say anything, Owen would do anything. He was a huge, gym-built statue of a man, with a knuckle-crunching, finger-grinding handshake and a broad knowledge of geology.
While he was writing for Ralph, he was the drummer in the band Oblivia, which was signed to BMG/RCA, released four singles and an album, toured Australia from Perth to Sydney, played support to the Screaming Jets and Catatonia, appeared on the Pepsi Chart Show and Good News Week, then split up without anybody having noticed they existed.
His greatest stage performances, however, were under the guise of Crap Elvis, something that had started with his appearance at the annual Elvis festival in Parkes. Crap Elvis lay dormant while I was away, but he was always on my mind. He staged the first of many comebacks after I noticed a poster advertising an Elvis look-alike contest at the Cat and Fiddle hotel in Rozelle.
Owen was easily persuaded into reforming himself for a one-off reunion gig, especially since I said he could arrive in a Cadillac with a beautiful woman on each arm. Unfortunately, I could not make it to the Cat and Fiddle – even though it was just up the road and I had nothing else to do – but Owen assured me that Crap Elvis received the most rapturous reception of his career, as dozens of people chanted his name over and over again – ‘Crap! Crap! Crap! Crap!’ – until he left the building.
When Owen offered to do a ‘Going Off’ pub crawl in Wollongong, I agreed, but only if he dressed as Elvis. Wollongong is a man’s town, and Owen was worried about getting his sunglasses crushed under a pair of Blundstones, and his sideburns ripped off and shoved up his arse. In the tradition of the original (or ‘earlier’) Elvis, he enlisted a bodyguard and, in the tradition of local boxer and bar-brawler Shannon Taylor, he drank in Dicey Rileys and Cooney’s Tavern and Bourbon Street. The Elvis costume proved especially popular with the girls. ‘Dress up as Elvis and go to the pub’ was one of the few scientifically proven chick-pulling methods ever documented in Ralph.
Even Crap Elvis had a subtext: it was okay to be useless. You did not have to be a goal-centred people person with seven highly effective habits. You could be the very worst in your field, a hopeless, deluded loser, and people would still love you. In the end, it was the self-conscious Elvises who looked stupid.
I was tired of the unremitting banality of most men’s magazines. In 1999, Brad had instructed us to run a ‘pigskin preview’, a look ahead to the new football season. We did, and so did every other newspaper and magazine, all of them with greater authority than Ralph. I felt humiliated that we had come out with the same coverline as Inside Sport, and nursed the wound for two years. In 2001, when Ralph was the fastest-growing adult magazine in Australia, we again ran a pigskin preview, but this time Owen rang a pig farmer and asked what pigskins would be used for next year. ‘All sorts of things,’ said the farmer. ‘They’re cutting up bits and pieces of the pig. They’re doing them up and selling them off as dog food, like little sort of snack things.’
With Eric the workie, Yvonne Firmin, Captain Stupid, Crap Elvis, the talking penguins and the occasional inexplicable curtain calls of the Doner, much of Ralph became a chronicle of a nonexistent milieu where powerless superheroes stalked suburban supervillains, and takeaway food had thoughts and feelings. We reduced the number of female nipples, which are scattered through every men’s magazine like secret treats, and replaced them with shots of Ivan in women’s clothing.
Our lowest sales of the year always came when FHM released its ‘100 Sexiest Women in the World’ tip-on. It was one of the most powerful brands on the planet, and received more publicity in a month than we did in a year. In 2001, we went up against it with our own booklet, the ‘150 Sexiest Women in Australia and New Zealand’. We offered the readers pictures of 150 local supermodels, soapie stars, sportswomen and singers, and asked them to vote for their favourite. Almost hidden among Tatiana Grigoriev and the Pleasure Machine was Eric’s sister, Erica: Ivan, repulsively ugly in pigtails and lingerie. We said she was a workie at Cleo and, when the votes were counted, she outpolled Elle Macpherson.
The readers’ choice of fantasy women, who ranged from newsreaders to the dancers on the preschoolers’ show Hi-5, made me realise: (1) Young men watch everything on TV; (2) They do so with the profound but unspoken hope that the presenters’ tops will slip off. We sold 122 931 copies of the Australia’s Sexiest issue, as opposed to 80 933 in the same month the year before. When we produced our own ‘Sexiest Women in the World’ booklet, we nominated 200 women against FHM’s 100. From being half as good as the competition, we grew to twice as good. We were setting sales records with every third issue. The weirder Ralph grew, the more different it became to FHM, the more it sold.
I altered the way our features were written, by taking out the journalist. Unless the writer was involved in the story – if, for instance, he jumped out of a plane, or into the ring – I did not want to hear his voice. Ordinary people can tell their own story with more skill than most journalists. They use a richer, less formulaic language and sharper, more realistic vocabulary. They tend not to view their lives as reducible to a series of convenient clichés.
I had every feature in Ralph written in the first person: the journalist transcribed and edited, but he did not augment or analyse. We had prisoners, war heroes, drug dealers, rock stars and disaster survivors all speaking directly to the readers. We invited old soldiers into our saloon bar, bought them a drink and listened to them yarn.
Th
ere were only two problems left to solve: Advertising and New Zealand. The Advertising team was held to be doing fantastically well, continually coming in above budget. This was largely because their budget had been set in view of last year’s circulation. We were now outperforming FHM in Australia, but the ad guys were only selling three-quarters as many ads as FHM’s team. ACP grew impatient with the amount of money I wanted to put into ‘the product’, but could not see we were under-resourced because our revenue was too low.
I fought with the ad manager, Scott, but I respected him more than any of my other corporate opponents. At least he did his job. An arcane power struggle was taking place among the senior management of the advertising department, and a new appointee took a liking to Scott and his girlfriend. They were among the elite reps invited to a time-wasting camp, where they were hailed as role models for ad managers throughout the company. HR had them fill out a multiple-choice personality-test questionnaire. It was suggested that since they obviously had the right type of personality for ad sales, new ad staff should be hired on the basis of how close they came to their profile when completing the same questionnaire.
Scott wanted to sell pages at the highest possible rate. ‘Yield’, the average cost per page, was his golden calf. Unfortunately, the one true God was bulk. Ralph needed fashion advertising, and fashion advertisers were not prepared to pay our asking price.
FHM gave away spreads to fashion clients, because FHM understood what nobody at ACP seemed able to grasp: when media buyers thumbed the magazine, they were not reading the stories, they were looking at the ads. When they saw fashion ads, they saw a suitable ‘environment’ for every other product from luxury watches to men’s fragrances.