Mama Mia Page 14

  ‘Quick! If you haven’t already left, I need you to bring me Panadeine and Naprogesic. They’re in the bathroom, second drawer down. I’ll meet you out the front of the hotel. God, I hope you get this before you leave! Call me!’

  ‘Oh shit. I can’t see.’ This is the thought that ran through my head as I sat at my second International Cosmo Editors’ Conference, this time in downtown Sydney. I was sitting between my best Cosmo friends, Ms South Africa and Ms Hungary, watching the editor of Thailand Cosmo give a hilarious presentation on the challenges of producing sex articles in her country where there are no words in the dictionary for ‘penis’ or ‘vagina’. ‘So we write things like “man-sword” or “love-pocket”,’ she deadpanned as the rest of us fell about in hysterics.

  As I looked up at the accompanying PowerPoint slide of a sex-story layout, a big splotch of white light suddenly obscured my vision. I knew what this meant. A migraine. Oh dear, I was fucked. In a few hours’ time I was due to host a lavish sit-down black-tie dinner and party for 500 people including all fifty-eight international editors, Helen Gurley Brown, assorted media players, celebrities and the Packers. I had to give the main speech. And if I didn’t get the right pills into me in the next twenty minutes, I would be unable to do anything other than lie in a very dark room and whimper into a pillow for twenty-four hours.

  This was very bad. I grabbed my handbag, scrambled out of my seat and tried to inconspicuously slip out of the conference room. ‘Bathroom,’ I mouthed to Helen as I crept past. Once outside, I grabbed my phone out of my bag and quickly dialled Jason. Fortunately, he was just leaving home to come and collect the breast milk I’d expressed for Luca in my last break.

  I knew if I took the pills while my vision was still obscured I had a chance to circumvent the worst of my migraine and I’d just be left with a whopping hangover feeling. But if my vision cleared, it was too late. Within minutes the migraine would hit and I’d be in the foetal position until tomorrow.

  I waited for Jason at the hotel’s entrance, the bottle of breast milk clutched in my hand. As I saw his car approach, I ran over and he wound down the window to hand me the pills. ‘Do you have water?’ he asked. ‘No!’ I yelped. ‘Shit! SHIT!’

  I quickly considered my options. I was running out of time. I calculated that getting to a shop or even back inside the hotel to find water would take too long. I didn’t have a second to lose. There was only one thing to do. With one hand I tossed the pills into my mouth and with the other I undid the lid of the bottle and washed them down with two big gulps of my breast milk. It was still warm. Clearly, this is known as having it all, I thought. I quickly handed Jason the rest of the milk to take home and feed Luca who was sleeping in his capsule. I gave Luca a quick kiss on his warm fuzzy head before running back into the hotel.

  I suffered from migraines only occasionally and they were always stress related. It would be safe to say I was stressed. Hearst had decided to hold the biennial Cosmo conference in Sydney to coincide with the twenty-fifth birthday of Australian Cosmo. This was handy because it meant I could attend even though Luca was only a few months old. Flying overseas would have been impossible.

  Convenience aside, it was stressful being the host country because I felt totally responsible for everyone having a great time. Like a proud parent, I wanted to show off my country and have everyone be dreadfully impressed by it.

  Unfortunately, my country was being difficult by bunging on the worst weather I could remember. It was raining torrentially and freezing and horrible. Venturing outside was a lot like standing under a waterfall.

  We’d already cancelled the harbour cruise and the surfing lessons at Bondi. After three days, the polite, ‘When do you think the rain will stop?’ queries I’d been fielding from seventy-five foreigners were threatening to turn hostile.

  Having brightly babbled, ‘It usually never rains in Sydney!’ to everyone at every available opportunity, I sought refuge in small talk with Ms Russia, a fabulous gravel-voiced woman who chain-smoked heavy tar cigarettes at all times. ‘Oh well, at least the temperature must be a nice change from Moscow,’ I said. ‘Actually no,’ she shot back drily, lighting her next cigarette from her last one. ‘Right now it’s a sunny twenty-six degrees.’

  Not helping matters, the hotel was a disorganised shambles to the point where one day at lunch when yet something else went wrong, Ms Germany rolled her eyes and said loudly, ‘Now I understand why Michael Hutchence killed himself in this hotel.’

  In a desperate attempt to divert attention somewhere positive, I kept bringing up the subject of our big twenty-fifty birthday party. It’s amazing how language barriers and negativity disappear when fifty-eight women are discussing what they’re going to wear.

  Two years into my job, I was now a wee bit less starry-eyed about being a Cosmo editor and part of such a big global brand. I’d come to realise that these conferences had a more serious purpose than just girly fun and bonding.

  Gathering us together for an intense few days of presentations and discussions every two years was a valuable opportunity for Hearst to keep us all in line. The unspoken purpose of the conference was to reinforce the Cosmo formula to all the editors and reiterate the advantages of following it.

  Because not everyone did. At any one time, roughly sixty per cent of the editors stuck religiously to Helen’s Cosmopolitan blueprint. Thirty per cent of editors deviated a little (including me) and perhaps ten per cent produced a magazine that was—for Hearst—uncomfortably different from the mother brand. Occasionally, I would slip into this ten per cent.

  There were ‘good’ girls and ‘bad’ girls among the editors who swelled by around a dozen every conference as Hearst launched Cosmo into more and more countries. Helen, while charming to everyone, certainly had her favourites.

  Those who deviated from the formula were castigated, privately in Helen’s monthly hand-typed critiques and publicly at conferences. Helen would begin every conference with a presentation on what was considered Cosmo and what wasn’t. To illustrate her points, she used layouts from all our magazines, creating a hall of fame and a hall of shame on the PowerPoint screen. Like naughty schoolgirls, we all sat expectantly, waiting to see if one of our layouts made the shame section.

  At the first conference in Amsterdam, much of this went over my head. By the time Sydney rolled around, I too, made it into the hall of shame several times with stories or layouts that didn’t adhere to the way Helen felt Cosmo should look or read.

  One of these stories was a sealed section featuring ‘BRAD PITT NAKED’. In my attempts to generate new buzz around Cosmo, I’d decided it would be a good idea to publish photographs of Brad Pitt’s penis. These were not new photos and they had been published before, but—oddly—only in a men’s magazine—the very trashy but often hilarious Picture.

  As part of the ACP stable, Picture and its older brother People landed on my desk every week and I often flicked through them for a laugh. Mainstream men’s magazines and the internet weren’t yet around and these tabloid male weeklies were unique in the way they combined witty humour with bad taste and shockvalue pictures. They particularly loved a nude celebrity and if they couldn’t find one, they might just print pictures of famous women’s heads on nude models’ bodies.

  At some point during Brad Pitt’s relationship with Gwyneth Paltrow, the couple had holidayed in a Spanish villa. A paparazzi photographer had scaled a cliff and hidden under a bush for two days to capture images of Brad and Gwyneth sunbaking and frolicking nude around their private pool. Well, they thought it was private. Had they known there was a photographer watching, they clearly wouldn’t have been in the nude, nor would Brad have hidden his penis backwards between his legs and pretended he had a vagina to amuse his girlfriend.

  It was gold and I was looking for a gimmick. Something to shake things up a little. I remembered the shots and since no women’s magazine had ever published them and few women had seen them in Picture, I decided they’d make a terr
ific sealed section for Cosmo.

  To pad out the eight pages required to create a sealed section, I came up with the idea of doing a ‘Bye-Bye Brad’ special. He had just announced his engagement to Gwyneth so I used that as a hook to justify running so much coverage. The fact the pictures had already appeared in print worked to my advantage because it meant I only had to pay for second-run Australian rights. I bought the whole set of nude shots for around a grand and a bunch of other clothed Brad pictures—Brad’s movies! Brad’s girlfriends! Brad’s hairstyles!—to use around the nude ones.

  In my editor’s letter, I wrote:

  BRAD PITT NAKED. There’s not a woman I know who hasn’t fantasised about using those three words in the same sentence, preferably prefaced by, ‘This morning I woke up with…’

  Well, as his impending marriage beckons Brad into a life of monogamy, it’s becoming less and less likely that any of us will ever fulfil that happy fantasy. So this month, Cosmo is giving you the next best thing: a photographic tribute to what could have been yours if only you’d been born with the name Gwyneth Paltrow…Brad’s bits.

  Goodbye, farewell and amen to Brad’s bachelorhood. We’ll miss it.

  It was a tortured justification for running old, gratuitous shots but hey, I was editing Cosmo, not Time. And it worked. Oh how it worked.

  Sales took off into the stratosphere but Hearst was appalled. Cosmo may have been a pusher of sexual boundaries but naked penises were altogether a different thing. Even worse was the nature of the shots. They’d been taken illegally because Brad and Gwyneth had been on private property. It was also a gross invasion of their privacy. Compounding Hearst’s embarrassment, the couple had not long before been guests of the company on a promotional visit to Moscow for the launch of the Russian Harper’s Bazaar. Also, coming so soon after the death of Princess Diana, with public anger towards paparazzi and the magazines that published those kinds of unauthorised photos still intense, Hearst felt running the pics was a major error in editorial judgement. In hindsight, I could kinda see their point. But crikey, those shots—and sales figures—were good and that sealed section became infamous among the other Cosmo editors who couldn’t ever publish such flagrant raunchiness in their own countries.

  Brad wasn’t happy either. Thrillingly, I received a stern letter from his lawyers threatening to sue. Our own lawyers negotiated a grovelling apology instead and I published it with pleasure. It would be the closest I’d ever come to Brad Pitt, or his penis.

  ACP management defended me loyally and Hearst was eventually mollified by my promise not to do it again. In theory, they could take away ACP’s franchise or licensing agreement, but it was very rare that a partnership was broken this way and more likely to be a financial decision rather than an editorial one. Brad’s penis wasn’t enough to cost me my job.

  Editors were sacked sometimes, though, if Hearst was particularly unhappy with the way the magazine was heading over a period of time. At each conference there would always be a few new faces and a few hushed stories about editors who had been removed since we last came together.

  As the youngest of the Cosmo editors and with my circulation figures climbing, I was able to get away with rather a lot. Hearst looked on me indulgently, like a slightly naughty child. I traded on their goodwill at every opportunity. I knew I needed to make Cosmo provocative and a little outrageous again if it was going to remain relevant to an audience of Australian women who had more magazines to choose from than ever before.

  Stories like ‘Learn to be a Penis Genius in 10 Minutes’ and ‘Genital Makeovers: The OH-MY-GOD Sealed Section!’ could never run in US Cosmo or most other countries in which Cosmo was published, but because Australians had a relaxed attitude to sex and censorship, we could push boundaries with our content in a way other Cosmos just couldn’t.

  Back at the hotel, the only thing I was interested in pushing was my head into a pillow. I wasn’t up to returning to my colleague’s session so I went upstairs to a room that had been booked for the conference and slept for an hour while I waited for the pills to kick in. When I woke to the sound of a hair and make-up artist knocking on the door, my blinding migraine had been diverted into a dull thud. It was far from ideal but it was manageable. Cinderella, you will go to the ball. Whether you like it or not.

  As my post-baby short haircut was smoothed into place and make-up was slapped generously onto my face, I gritted my teeth. Having my hair and make-up done by a pro before hosting a Cosmo party was a perk but one I loathed. All that sitting still and being fussed over bored me stupid. I tried to practise the party speech I was due to give in two hours’ time, but the words were still a little blurry on the page due to my migraine hangover. I gave up. I’d have to wing it.

  The rain didn’t let up but the party was a success. I felt extremely out of it in the way you do after a migraine, and mixed with adrenaline, nerves and one glass of champagne, the night was a bit of a surreal blur. I recall watching all the editors on the dance floor in a circle with Helen dancing wildly in the middle—she loved a good boogie—and my speech going off okay, thanks to a well-placed autocue.

  I also remember being in the bathroom late in the evening and bumping into Kerri-Anne Kennerley, Australia’s queen of daytime TV, who had some sound advice. ‘When you have to give a speech, you must plant your feet either side of the lectern like this,’ she instructed, demonstrating the correct position in front of the mirror. ‘The way you had one leg wrapped around the other made it look like you needed to go to the toilet. And stand up straight.’

  She was right.

  MY SECRET LIFE AS A MOTHER

  SMS to all my girlfriends from me:

  ‘We’re engaged!’

  Even though Jason was still sick, I needed my fix of forward momentum. Next on my list of Big Things to Do was marriage.

  Back when I’d fallen pregnant with Luca, we’d agreed it could wait. We’d already bought a house together after six months and three months after that I was pregnant. On the night of our first anniversary we went out to dinner to celebrate and I had to keep excusing myself to go to the bathroom to vomit because my morning sickness was peaking, oddly, in the evenings. I was editing Cosmo, he was busy at work and renovating our new house and we hadn’t even had time to go on a holiday together.

  By having Luca before we got married, I loved that we’d done things in a non-conventional order. Given that the rest of my life was full of responsibility—my job, our mortgage, Luca—it was the one thing that made me feel a bit reckless and groovy. Woohooo.

  I made a decision early on not to write about Luca in my editor’s letter or speak about him in the media.

  Mostly this was because I wanted readers to relate to me. If they knew I was a mother, I reasoned, it would immediately jar with their idea of me as a Cosmo girl. They wouldn’t imagine being me and they couldn’t imagine me being like them. While I sometimes mentioned Jason, it was only in the vaguest of terms. I think, too, there was a part of me that enjoyed the fantasy, or perhaps felt the pressure to be young and cool and out there—things I was never really good at.

  There was my Cosmo life and my real life, and they were eons apart.

  As Jason’s illness entered its second year, we got engaged, although I never wrote about that either. We put the actual wedding on hold because Jason wasn’t well enough, but we had an impromptu engagement party combined with Luca’s first birthday. It was enough to satisfy me temporarily.

  The cure for Jason’s CFS, when it came six months later, was dramatic. Conventional medicine had little to suggest beyond ‘time’, which frankly wasn’t good enough. So we’d turned to alternative medicine, trying everything from reiki to vitamin C injections, Chinese medicine, acupuncture…Jason gave it all a shot. Each time he embarked on a new treatment we tried to manage our expectations after having our hopes napalmed so many times. But it was difficult not to hope that each one might just be the cure.

  Perhaps the most gruelling thing Jason tried
was daily icecold baths. I think the theory was that the extreme temperature would shock the body’s systems into kick-starting themselves again. Or something. I didn’t really care about how; I just wanted it to work.

  It didn’t. Then Jason’s mother called one night with news of a South African doctor who had apparently helped a friend of a neighbour of a friend. I watched Jason carefully write down the details, gritting his teeth at the thought of chasing shadows yet again.

  The endless trek down dead ends was debilitating, I knew, but he didn’t give himself the luxury of giving up. And it was lucky he didn’t because this one proved to be the answer.

  There are many triggers for CFS—any number of viruses can do it and not every person is affected in the same way—but this particular doctor had discovered that in some cases CFS is caused by an organism called rickettsia, very common in third-world rural areas, but not so common in Australia. She also discovered that several courses of extremely highdosage antibiotics would kill the organism and cure the patient of CFS.

  Trying not to get his hopes up, Jason contacted the doctor, who asked him to send a blood sample to her in South Africa so she could determine whether he was a good candidate for her treatment.

  Bingo. The doctor faxed through the simple instructions for Jason to take to his GP, who then wrote him a script for the antibiotics.

  We saw the effects in less than a fortnight. Jason’s head began to clear, his sleeping improved, and the oppressive crush of exhaustion that had been suffocating him for almost eighteen months began to slowly lift. Within two months he was pretty much cured.

  Next stop? Our wedding. A few months after Jason was back at work, we stood in front of our family and friends and said our vows. It was a wonderful, crazy day, pouring with rain and unseasonably freezing. Jo was my matron of honour and she carried Luca down the aisle.

  Before Jason and I had a chance to take a breath, I fell pregnant again.