Mama Mia Page 10

  ‘Um, oooh, yes, I’d love to,’ was what I actually said and she carefully transferred the peacefully gurgling little boy into my awkward arms. It felt like a test I hadn’t studied for.

  I’d hoped that since I had my own baby inside my body at this point, a mere five weeks away from being outside my body, somehow the maternal secrets of the universe would be unlocked and it would all suddenly feel magically right. It didn’t.

  I was self-conscious and uncoordinated. I rocked back and forth a bit and made the requisite cooing noises as I madly wondered how long was enough time before I could give him back. Naturally, he began to cry and any shred of confidence I had was obliterated. This mother business was going to be harder than I thought.

  FULL HEAD TRANSPLANT

  Voicemail to Cosmo’s art director from me:

  ‘Hey, I need you to chop off Alyssa’s head again. We need to run her for the Feb cover. Come see me when you’re back.’

  The most important part of an editor’s job is choosing the cover. Nothing has a bigger impact on sales. So oddly, there is surprisingly little research about what works. It’s a frustratingly inexact science although every editor has her theories. Generally, if an issue sells well, the cover takes the credit. If it’s a flop, the cover is blamed.

  There are other factors that come into play too. What your competitors have on offer that month, for instance. Your cover may be a killer but if another magazine has something better—a mascara stuck on the front or a jumbo-sized issue or exclusive photos of Angelina Jolie with new babies—this can impact negatively on your sales.

  Readers might also be turned off (or on) by a coverline or the size of your magazine. The colours you choose might appeal or not. Then there’s the cover price. Australian magazines are notoriously expensive and the best way for a new mag to gain a fast foothold is to launch with a bargain cover price. Glamour launched very successfully that way in the UK, as did OK! magazine here. But in most cases, bad sales are due to a lousy cover. So it’s crucial the editor chooses the cover very carefully.

  Up until the early 1990s, ordinary ‘models’ appeared on the covers of Cosmo and Cleo. No one knew their names. You didn’t have to. It was all about how they looked, a feeling, not who they were dating or which cereal they ate. Usually, the cover photo wasn’t even a separate shoot, it came from one of the fashion stories inside the magazine.

  In the mid nineties this changed and suddenly any old model just wouldn’t do. You needed a supermodel. For the magazines that relied on shots of the half-dozen or so supermodels who moved copies, this effectively meant the end of shooting your own covers. You had to buy them from international photographers. It wasn’t so much the price that was prohibitive (the same editorial day rate was paid to all models, even the super ones) but the access. When you’re Cindy Crawford and you can spend your day shooting a cover for US Vogue (huge prestige), a Revlon commercial (huge cash) or the cover of an Australian magazine (no prestige, tiny cash), three guesses how you’re going to allocate your time.

  For a few years, Cosmo and Cleo alternated a very small roster of supermodel cover girls: Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer, Daniela Pestova, Laetitia Casta, Karen Mulder and Elle Macpherson. Not all supermodels sold magazines and the only way to discover this was through trial and error. As another editor once told me: ‘The first time I put Helena Christensen on the cover and it was a dog I thought surely it couldn’t be Helena’s fault. The second time, I thought maybe it’s Helena’s fault. The third time I knew Helena barked.’

  Why? Who knows. With Danish–Peruvian parents, perhaps she looked too exotic. All the bestselling supermodel cover girls were white almost to the point of Aryan. It’s a dirty little secret in magazines that covers of Asian or dark-skinned women don’t sell. Famous, super or not. This is disappointing and disgraceful and most editors wish it wasn’t the case. But does that mean they can afford to do the right thing by opting for more visual diversity and putting Asian and dark-skinned women on their covers? Not if they want to sell magazines and keep their jobs.

  It comes back to the rule about giving readers what they want, not what you think they should have, even if you’re not always happy about it. Even if you’re sometimes ashamed.

  About a year after I began editing Cosmo, readers decided they didn’t want supermodels any more. Cindy, Claudia and their genetically freaky peers stopped selling like they used to. An era was ending. Magazines all over the world had ridden the supermodel wave to great effect, and at Cleo I’d had to write a bazillion fawning stories about them.

  We had dissected everything from their beauty regimes to their wardrobes, relationships, hairstyles, diet secrets, travel tips, exercise routines, bank accounts and even their sex lives. The genre peaked—or bottomed out—when I wrote a story called ‘Lesbian Supermodels’ that delved into ‘the secret world of the supermodels who sleep with each other’. Of course it was all based on rumour but it made a cracker of a coverline.

  In the course of reading and writing so much about the dozen or so supermodels with whom our readers were on a first-name basis, inane knowledge had implanted itself in my brain. Niki Taylor had a tattoo of a daisy on the top of her left foot. Linda Evangelista only wore G-string underwear. Claudia Schiffer drank a cup of hot water with lemon every morning. Cindy Crawford liked to squeeze her pimples in the bathroom on aeroplanes. Vendela’s biggest regret in life was that her nail beds were too short.

  Riveting it wasn’t. So I was hardly surprised when readers collectively tired of reading such inanity and looked for new pretty things to gaze at.

  It was the dawning of the age of celebrity. Actresses and pop stars like the Jennifers (Lopez and Aniston) kicked Claudia and Cindy off the cover of Cosmo and Cleo never to return.

  I was delighted by this for a couple of reasons. As a reader myself, I was bored stupid with looking at the same handful of genetically gifted freaks month after month. As an editor, I was sick of competing with every other magazine on the planet for the same pictures of them. As a feminist, I was jubilant that having celebrities on the cover meant that Cosmo’s covergirls finally had a skill other than being tall and slim with prominent cheekbones. They could act. Or sing. They also were a more diverse bunch. From Natalie Imbruglia to Jennifer Aniston, Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Lopez, Gwyneth Paltrow, Madonna, Alyssa Milano, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Kylie, Christina Applegate, Naomi Watts, Sarah Jessica Parker…suddenly there was a diversity of ages, nationalities and body shapes after years of brutally same-same supermodels.

  Still, the celebrity covergirls were overwhelmingly slim. Not model-slim but slim nonetheless. I hoped and waited for someone larger to become famous enough for a Cosmo cover and the closest I got (apart from Sara-Marie from ‘Big Brother’) was Kelly Osbourne.

  In 2002, when her family’s reality show ‘The Osbournes’ was killing it in the ratings, Kelly was flown to Australia to present at the ARIA awards. Opportunistically, I grabbed the chance to buy a shot of her and put it on the cover to coincide with the visit. I shouldn’t have. It was a disaster.

  In the only remotely suitable shot I could find, Kelly was wearing a tight yellow top with dark jeans and a hot-pink leather belt to match her hot-pink hair. I knew I was straying approximately a million miles from traditional Cosmo cover territory but her pose was sexy and her make-up was beautiful. I thought it could work. Hearst was apoplectic. The verdict from Helen came via fax instead of snail mail, which meant she was agitated. Even so, it began in her signature iron-fist-in-velvet-glove style.

  Mia dear,

  You put out a wonderful magazine and all those readers buy and advertisers kick in. Mia, Hearst is perfectly happy with the November cover and there surely is a lot to be happy about in the magazine—wonderful articles and all that advertising but I have a rough time with the cover because it isn’t Cosmo! Yes, it’s something Mia wants to do and Mia is a wildly successful editor but, Mia, you make it so hard on us with the rest of the countries. If Mia can do anythi
ng in the world she pleases (put Kelly Osbourne on the cover instead of a Cosmo model), why can’t they?

  We are trying desperately to have all of these countries produce Cosmo—why? Because it works! It works all over the world. It’s hard to tell them they can’t go out there and do anything that possibly enters their head when Mia gets to do exactly what she wants to do!

  It went on for several pages like this and while she never actually said ‘…AND SHE’S FAT!’ I could read it between every line. Helen didn’t like fat in any part of life, heaven forbid on the cover of Cosmo. As it turned out, she was absolutely right. Not about the fat part but about Kelly Osbourne being a lousy cover choice. Sales tanked abysmally.

  To this day, I don’t believe it had anything to do with her size. Kelly Osbourne was just unlikeable. She was a foul-mouthed, obnoxious brat who had no obvious reason for being famous apart from her father being Ozzy Osbourne. Just to underline this point and kill my circulation definitively, Kelly appeared up on the red carpet at the ARIA awards and called Natalie Imbruglia a cunt, just as we went on sale. I can’t even remember why, but it didn’t win her many new fans. Lesson learned. Ironically, Kelly’s larger-than-the-average-covergirl size had blinded me to the fact that she was not AT ALL right for Cosmo.

  What makes one model or celebrity cover gold while another seemingly similar celeb is cover poison? Again, every editor has a different theory.

  For Cosmo and Cleo, the covergirl has to be someone you like, someone you’d like to be or be friends with. Someone a little intriguing too. An interesting personal life helps. So does a famous boyfriend.

  Another factor is vulnerability. A Cosmo or Cleo covergirl should have some degree of realness. They shouldn’t be impenetrably perfect. Nicole Kidman was widely acknowledged to be cover poison for all mags until she was dumped by Tom Cruise. That seemed to make her a more sympathetic, interesting figure and more editors used her after that. Still, I never risked her on Cosmo because her image didn’t resonate with the Cosmo reader who was most likely twenty-three and single.

  One thing that’s clear though is that there are trends. Certain people sell magazines better than others and just when you’ve worked out who those people are, they inexplicably stop working. And occasionally, you can break all the rules and still somehow land a winner.

  Pamela Anderson is the perfect example of an unexpected hit. You’d not normally think of her as Cosmo covergirl material. She’s more of a men’s-magazine type. But the key—I believe—to the success of our cover with Pamela was the coverline I stole from South African Cosmo, which ran the shot first. ‘Why Is Pammy On Our Cover?’ we asked, articulating what many readers would have been thinking and thus neutralising any negativity. It worked. The issue sold beautifully.

  Even when you thought you knew who would sell well, securing the right shot was a nightmare. Getting access to the kinds of celebrities you needed for your cover—internationally famous ones—was virtually impossible for an Australian magazine. Occasionally, Cosmo could piggyback on US Cosmo and use one of their cover shots but this didn’t happen often because Cosmo in the United States was still mostly using models on its covers. Easier and cheaper. Half their luck.

  The majority of the time, Cosmo, like Cleo and most Australian magazines, had to trawl photo agencies and other publications, looking for cover shots to buy. This was hard.

  Say Gwyneth Paltrow does a shoot for US Vogue to publicise her new film. The photographer owns the rights to this shot, not Vogue or Gwyneth. So if you want to buy it for your magazine’s cover, you must approach the photographer’s agency. While you negotiate a price—celebrity covers now sell for in excess of US$15,000 each—you must simultaneously approach Gwyneth’s publicist for written approval to buy the shot. Without it, the photographer won’t sell it to you because he doesn’t want to piss off Gwyneth who can make him a lot of money in the future. To gain approval from the publicist, you must send a copy of the story you want to run with the cover shot, usually one you’ve bought from an overseas magazine or newspaper because Australia is low down the pecking order when stars grant interviews. Even when the story you submit to the publicist is suitably sycophantic, if Gwyneth does not have a movie being released in Australia at the time your issue goes on sale, the publicist will say no to prevent Gwyneth from being overexposed.

  This is how Gwyneth controls her image and this is how editors become prematurely grey-haired. If you’ve ever wondered why the celebrity features accompanying covers are so utterly lame, now you know. Write a story about how Gwyneth has a rocky relationship, or say, a pimple and you’re unlikely to get approval to buy any shot to go with it.

  Okay, so by some miracle, the planets have aligned, you’ve secured approval and negotiated a price for the cover. Now the shot arrives and it’s retouched to buggery. Bad luck. That’s all you can use. Celebrities will not approve any un-retouched image of themselves. So even if editors wanted to run more realistic cover images, in most cases they simply don’t have access to any.

  I’ve been attacked many times over the issue of covers. ‘You’re the editor, you can decide who goes on the cover,’ critics will say. ‘So why don’t you have more dark-skinned women or bigger women or older women or women who aren’t just actresses, models and pop stars on your magazine?’

  I once spoke at a body-image forum in front of several thousand schoolgirls. Even though I was there to speak about all the positive steps Cosmo had taken to portray a more healthy body image in the magazine, I unwittingly became a whipping girl for all the sins of all magazines, past and present. During question time, girl after girl stood up and abused me for the way magazines publish unrealistic images of women.

  No matter how much I pointed to the good things Cosmo was doing to turn this around and agreed that there was still a long way to go and that magazines needed to be more responsible, they became more and more aggressive. Finally, one girl got up and shouted into the microphone: ‘If you’re so committed to changing things, why don’t you put me on your cover?’

  A cheer went up and I took a breath, which I possibly should have saved. ‘As much as I would love to put you on a Cosmo cover—or, say, myself—it’s likely that the only people who would buy those issues are our friends. And this would fall a bit short of the quarter of a million copies of Cosmo I need to sell every month.’ There was booing from the back of the hall. I persevered. ‘You need someone extremely famous to move that many copies of a magazine. You need to remember that magazines are not a school project or a public service announcement, they are a business. Sometimes I have to put my personal feelings aside because as much as I would like to put you or Natasha Stott Despoja or Cathy Freeman on the cover, I have to choose the person I think will sell the most copies, even if it’s Jennifer Aniston—again.’

  While some of my words were drowned out, lots of girls came up to me afterwards to say they loved what Cosmo was doing for body image.

  I wasn’t that flustered, really. I understood the anger and I liked the challenge of trying to disarm aggressive people, even if it didn’t always work.

  Had they known the truth about what routinely goes on behind the scenes of a cover, they would have thrown eggs.

  Back before publicists and photographers got wise to the power they wielded over magazines that desperately need their photos to sell copies, you could get away with a few tricks.

  I first learned this lesson when I watched an art director remove the stairs from the background of a shot and replace them with a beach. Next, she removed the model’s knee from in front of her seated torso and replaced it with a belly button. Then she carved out a thinner waist. The model was Elle Macpherson and that issue sold very well indeed.

  Years later, I would sometimes work my own black magic on covers. Alyssa Milano was a mysteriously popular covergirl, despite having only been on two moderately successful TV shows. Infuriatingly, Ms Milano didn’t like doing publicity and shots of her were incredibly scarce. US Cosmo ph
otographed her once for a cover and there were a couple of different outfits in the series to choose from. We used one and sales went ballistic, so a few months later I went back to look at the other shot. Frustratingly, she wasn’t smiling and while the clothes and pose were terrific, her face was not.

  Without a second thought, I asked my art director to take the head from the first image and put it on the body of the second. It was still all Alyssa but the image was artificially constructed. It didn’t really exist. Editors did this not infrequently before photo agencies got wise to the practice and began issuing massive penalties for altering cover images. I paid a few of those. I know of certain covers of other magazines which have featured a celebrity’s head grafted onto the body of one of the magazine’s staff, shot from the neck down and wearing an outfit that the editor and art director liked more than the celebrity’s original one. Of course if you’ve shot the celebrity yourself, as some mags do, you can do what you like. If it makes her look better, she won’t complain.

  It was a far milder transgression that landed me in the middle of a media controversy. I’d bought a shot of Cameron Diaz from an agency after it appeared on the cover of UK New Woman and, in designing the cover, we decided to change the colour of the background on the original shot. We also changed the colour of Cameron’s dress. I’d done it loads of times. No big deal. Or so I thought.

  When the cover came out, Australian New Woman decided to stir the pot by sending out a press release revealing what we’d done. The media pounced and readers were horrified. I received dozens of angry letters from women saying we’d misled and deceived them. But it’s just a frock, I protested, missing their point entirely. They thought Cameron had been wearing a red dress when in fact it was blue. So what else might we be lying about?

  A lot, as it turns out. Women are justified in mistrusting the images they see in magazines. In recent years, a new job has crept onto the staff list at the front of every magazine. It’s usually called something like ‘digital production’ and it basically means retouching. Every image you see in a magazine has been digitally altered—every product and every person. Some, just for clarity or colour correction, others for ‘unsightly blemishes’ like stretch marks, pimples, pores, freckles, moles, pigmentation, cellulite or goosebumps.