Mama Mia Page 7

  AND THEN SHE CALLED ME PUSSYCAT

  Voicemail to Wendy from me:

  ‘Hi, it’s me! I just met Helen Gurley Brown and OH. MY. GOD. You have no idea. She’s unbelievable. Will fill you in on every detail when I’m home. Do you want anything duty free? Anything except cigarettes. When are you going to quit that disgusting habit? ‘

  I was about to be crowned the new editor of Australian Cosmo—only the third in its thirty-year history. However, before I could officially be presented with my sash and my staff, I had to pass one important test. I had to meet Cosmo’s founder, the iconic Helen Gurley Brown.

  Currently, Cosmopolitan has fifty-eight international editions, is printed in thirty-four languages and is distributed in more than one hundred countries with seventy-eight million readers globally. And like most of the international editions, Australian Cosmo is a joint venture between the brand’s owner and publisher, US media giant Hearst, and a local publisher, in this case Australian Consolidated Press.

  Because we are voracious magazine readers, Australian Cosmo has the highest circulation per capita of any Cosmopolitan in the world and Hearst has always had an excellent business relationship with its Australian partners. Hearst had complete trust in my predecessor, Pat, and since she had chosen me as her replacement, I came well recommended. But I still had to be vetted by Hearst.

  This meant flying to New York for two important interviews. The first was with the Vice President of Hearst International who quizzed me on what I thought about Cosmopolitan as a brand and where I might take it in Australia. I could talk about magazines under wet cement so that part was no problem.

  Next, I was taken to meet Helen Gurley Brown. As the editor of US Cosmo, Helen didn’t have direct control over editorial appointments on the international editions but in every other way, she was Cosmopolitan. She had literally invented it.

  She was born in Arkansas some time around 1922 (it’s hard to get a lock on her exact age) and started her working life as a secretary but shot to fame upon the release of her first book, the controversial Sex and the Single Girl. Helen was about forty years old when it was published in 1962 and the book became an instant bestseller. Full of advice for single girls, its most sensational premise was that a woman didn’t need to be married to enjoy sex. In fact, she didn’t need to be married at all.

  It wasn’t just the sex part that readers could relate to. They also identified with the idea of the ‘mouseburger’ as Helen called herself, a woman who had not been born rich or well connected, particularly clever or especially beautiful, but who had made it anyway, via hard work and determination.

  Soon afterwards, Helen pitched the idea of a magazine for women to US publishers based on the messages of Sex and the Single Girl and was invited by Hearst to take over their ailing title Cosmopolitan. Her first issue appeared in July 1965, and Helen’s philosophy for Cosmo was the same one she applied to her own life: self-improvement. What woman doesn’t want a better relationship? Better sex? Better hair? A better job? A better wardrobe? A better body? Cosmo was the original self-help manual, decades before the genre would spawn Mars & Venus and Dr Phil. The Cosmo girl, as created by Helen, saw no conflict between loving men and being ambitious. She wanted to please men and herself. Deep-cleavage feminism, some called it. The formula worked.

  Helen’s Cosmopolitan would go on to become the most successful magazine in the world.

  I knew virtually nothing of this impressive legacy as I waited outside Helen’s office. My knowledge of Helen Gurley Brown was based on her more recent press, which had been equally controversial—and not for pushing socio-sexual boundaries in a good way.

  Around the 1980s, Helen had begun to be seen by some not as a feminist pioneer but as someone worryingly retro in many of her views. In particular, that straight women couldn’t contract HIV and that sexual harassment in the workplace was harmless fun.

  There was also disquiet from some of Helen’s contemporaries about the man-pleasing aspects of her Cosmo philosophy. Feminist icon Gloria Steinem told the New York Times in 1996: ‘She deserves credit for having introduced sexuality into women’s magazines—Cosmo was the first. But then it became the unliberated woman’s survival kit, with advice on how to please a man, lover or boss in any circumstances, and also—in a metaphysical sense—how to smile all the time. The Cosmo girl needs to become a woman.’

  There was some truth to this. The flip side to the empowerment message of self-improvement is that women’s magazines like Cosmo are essentially sold on angst. The idea is that the mag tells you that you have a problem, and then helps you fix it. By perpetuating feelings of inadequacy, it cements its role in making you feel better. Helen had invented the formula and used it with wild success. Now it was my turn to take the Cosmo baton in Australia.

  I was ushered into Helen’s office, which could only be described as teenage girl’s bedroom meets bordello. It was wall-to-wall leopard-print carpet with gilt-edged antiquey-looking furniture and a sofa decked in chintzy rose fabric. There was a stuffed lion, a teddy bear wearing a pearl necklace, and an embroidered cushion that said, ‘Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere’.

  While I was trying to take all of it in, a tiny bird-like creature stood up behind a small desk where she’d been obscured by a large typewriter. Helen.

  As she skipped towards me—actually skipped—I felt my eyes widen. It was a visual riot.

  Helen was wearing a black micro miniskirt and black fishnet stockings with black patent slingbacks. Her shirt was hot-pink satin with unbuttoned flashes of black lace bra underneath. And cleavage. She was wearing lots of very fancy gold jewellery and she was the size of my little finger. There was lots of make-up, artfully arranged brown hair and a face that was the disconcerting result of too much surgery.

  In the future, she would happily talk to me—and anyone—about her facelifts and other procedures, even the breast implants she’d had in her late seventies. Her husband was not happy about those. ‘He liked my bosoms,’ she said fondly. ‘He thought it was unnecessary.’

  I’d never met an icon before and had no idea what to expect. Helen was the most charming and flirtatious person I’d ever met. As she blinked up at me from heavily made-up eyes, I felt like a large gargoyle. I am not a tall person—in fact, I am moderately sized—but Helen is a sparrow.

  Her coquettish manner was instantly disarming as she shone the full light of her attention on me, and I quickly understood it was merely the window-dressing for an extremely sharp business brain. She was familiar with the Australian magazine market and asked me about Cleo and my time working there. She knew who Lisa Wilkinson was. She also wanted to know all about my personal life. Did I have a boyfriend? How long had we been together? And then she called me Pussycat.

  ‘I don’t have any children so you can be like my daughter, Pussycat,’ she said as she gently steered me out of her office after about twenty minutes. I wasn’t sure of the correct response. Should I purr? Rub myself against her legs? Clearly I’d made a good impression if she wanted to adopt me. Later, I’d learn that it was one of the standard lines she used with any editor under fifty. Still, I was chuffed. And, it seemed, anointed.

  LET’S NOT TALK ABOUT SEX

  Voicemail to Pat from me:

  ‘Hi, sorry to call you on the weekend but I was just really keen to tell you about my new Cosmo idea. It’s about sex and relationships and I think it could be really amazing. I’ll make a time to see you first thing on Monday to explain.’

  On my first day as editor of Cosmo, I noticed I was the youngest person there. By decades in some cases. I was a couple of months shy of my twenty-fifth birthday and my team of twenty staff ranged from mid twenties to late forties.

  This should have made me nervous or self-conscious or possibly insecure. It didn’t. The older I get, the more I realise I don’t know. But back then? I thought I knew rather a lot. Everything, in fact. Gen Y didn’t invent over-confidence, they merely picked up the baton w
hen Gen X dropped it after growing up and realising there was an infinite amount more to learn.

  My over-confidence got me into a lot of trouble that first year. I made many mistakes. Some were with staff. Like the way I blithely reassured a pregnant staffer, ‘Sure, we’ll work it out so you can go part time after the baby is born!’ and then changed my mind when her daughter was a few months old. I had no idea at the time how much I’d messed with her life by being so cavalier about the terms of her employment. It was a disgraceful thing to do.

  Other mistakes involved the magazine itself. Like deciding we should remove all the sex and relationship stories from Cosmo and toss them in the bin.

  ‘All that stuff is so tired and old-fashioned,’ I insisted to my boss with the supreme certainty of a twenty-four-year-old novice editor. ‘So 1980s! Women are over it. We don’t need to read about how to have a better orgasm or how to tell if he’s about to dump you any more! Bor-ing!’

  Regarding me carefully and no doubt thinking, ‘Is this girl completely clueless?’ Pat blinked a few times. Her out-loud response was a cautious green light. ‘All right, let’s give it a try but we’ll have to watch sales very carefully.’

  This clearly went against her better judgement because sex and relationships were the two most fundamental foundations of the Cosmo brand. Always have been. In every country of the world. Successfully. Australia included.

  But since she’d hired me to ensure Cosmo stayed relevant to the next generation, she decided to listen to what I had to say and allow me to try some new things. Maybe, just maybe, I was right.

  I was wrong. In what would turn out to be both my greatest strength and weakness as an editor, I was desperate to take Cosmo in a new, more modern direction. To position it away from its heritage. To make it different from Cleo. To reinvent the wheel.

  With a huge, successful international brand of any kind, the key to remaining huge and successful is to change via evolution, not revolution. Don’t scare the advertisers. Don’t lose readers. But I was impatient to make my mark and evolution sounded far too slow and dull. I wanted to prove I was a genius by making fast, flashy changes.

  The lesson I learned was certainly fast: edit for your readers, not for yourself. How could I have forgotten this so quickly? Just because I was sick of reading sex and relationship stories (not helped by the fact I’d had to write so many of the bloody things over the previous five years), it didn’t mean all Cosmo readers felt the same way. In fact, most of them felt exactly the opposite.

  There was no denying I was nothing like my typical reader. I was settled and secure in a long-term relationship. And because I was in love, it made me immune to the angst upon which all sex and relationship stories are built. Most Cosmo readers were single and one of the main reasons they bought the magazine was for stories about sex positions and finding your soulmate.

  Without any sex or relationship coverlines on that first issue, sales tanked. My U-turn was instant. As was the sharp reminder that I couldn’t edit Cosmo for myself. Not if I wanted to keep my job. There’s one other crucial thing this early misstep taught me: if you’re going to take something away, you’d better replace it with something even better.

  When Lisa made the controversial decision to ditch the famous Cleo centrefold in the eighties because she felt it had become tired and tacky, she replaced it with the equally iconic Most Eligible Bachelors feature. Sales didn’t slide. They increased. Attracting new readers without losing all your old ones is a highwire act. You have to proceed with caution. Fortunately, Pat was my safety net. She consistently gave me the freedom to try things she didn’t necessarily agree with but never to the long-term detriment of the brand or the bottom line. By doing this, she allowed me to learn practical lessons rather than just telling me what to do.

  My biggest challenge was to find a new way to tell old stories. Messing with the fundamentals of Cosmo was obviously not an option. When anyone asked her about the fact Cosmo had been covering the same subjects for thirty years, Helen Gurley Brown always replied, ‘Feelings like jealousy, love, low self-esteem, insecurity, they are universal and timeless.’

  But something needed to change if we were to remain relevant to girls whose mothers had read Cosmo. One way we did it was with language. Regularly, Pat and I would stand in front of a wall of Cosmo covers, with sales figures in our heads, trying to work out what had caused particular issues to be winners or losers.

  ‘Look at what all these covers have in common,’ Pat suddenly said one day, pointing to four poor-selling issues. ‘Orgasms’. She was right. Each of the four covers had the word ‘orgasms’ in large type as part of sex coverlines: ‘Faster! Stronger! Longer! Orgasms Made Easy!’ shouted one. ‘Secrets of Women Who Have Orgasms!’ shrieked another. ‘His ‘n’ Her Orgasms: How To Slow Him Down and Speed You Up’ promised a third. ‘The Orgasm That Lasts 179 Times Longer: Come and Get It!’ Gee, that sounded exhausting.

  And perhaps that was the point. Women were tired of that word even if they still wanted the information. Every time the word ‘orgasm’ was prominent on the cover, sales went down. There were two reasons for this, we theorised. First of all, many Cosmo readers bought their magazines to read on public transport. Who wants to sit in a train full of strangers reading a story about orgasms? Ever since the spectre of HIV had entered the realm, a whiff of new puritanism had permeated society. For other readers, the opposite was true. Orgasm had become such an overused word on the cover of magazines that it was now a cheesy cliché.

  Cosmo had to be surprising again. Within the boundaries of appropriate Cosmo subject matter, I had to freshen up our approach. Apart from using different words, like ‘bonking’, we began to use humour, an approach I stole from the UK men’s market, which was starting to boom.

  But the biggest change I would ever make to the magazine during my time as editor was a visual one. Ironically, that would be the most controversial thing I could have done.

  THE MAGAZINE TWINS

  Voicemail to me from Cosmo’s art director:

  ‘Hey Mia, I’m at the printer and I’ve just snuck a peek at Cleo’s next cover. Shit. They’ve got Jennifer Aniston too.’

  What’s the difference between Cosmo and Cleo?

  I was asked this question, oh, about eight million times over the fifteen years I worked on both magazines. Depending on whom I was talking to and which magazine I wanted to favour, my answer varied. Even though the two titles and everyone who worked on them were fiercely competitive, both magazines were owned by ACP so you could never explicitly slag off your rival publicly. That would be unprofessional and could get you into trouble if word boomeranged back to your boss.

  You had to do your slagging discreetly. Since the internal rivalry was so extreme, both magazines were excellent at the subtle sledge.

  We did this with metaphors, some descriptive, some bitchy and some utterly nonsensical.

  Cleo is more Australian; Cosmo is international.

  Cleo is your sister; Cosmo is the slightly older girl next door.

  Cleo is Cameron Diaz; Cosmo is Jennifer Lopez.

  Cleo is a mirror to yourself; Cosmo is a window to the world.

  Cleo is inspirational; Cosmo is aspirational.

  Cleo is down to earth; Cosmo is sophisticated.

  Cleo is younger; Cosmo is older.

  Cleo is the beach; Cosmo is a cocktail bar.

  Cleo is a bikini; Cosmo is a little black dress.

  Cleo is the Logies; Cosmo is the Oscars.

  Cleo is Coke; Cosmo is Pepsi.

  Cleo is a one-night stand; Cosmo is a relationship.

  Cleo is a condom; Cosmo is the pill.

  The metaphors changed over the years and every editor and ad manager had her own bucket of neat one-liners to pull out for clients to make her own magazine look better.

  In actual fact, it was all rubbish. Yes, there have always been small differences in tone and visuals between the two titles depending on the editors, but they were so sub
tle as to be almost indistinguishable without a magnifying glass.

  Cosmo and Cleo have always covered the same subject matter in the same way and they put the same handful of celebrities on the cover month after month. Always have. They’re aimed at the same women of the same age and income. They are essentially twins—non-identical perhaps, but still twins.

  The two magazines are the same because, historically, Cleo was born from a business deal that suddenly turned on Kerry Packer. He transformed the unexpected setback into a revenge moment that became a stroke of commercial genius.

  Back in the late 1960s, Hearst magazines realised that the winning editorial formula created by Helen Gurley Brown in 1965 could become an international one. The foundations of Cosmo—sex, relationships, fashion, career, beauty, health, friendship—were the same for women in most countries of the world. And so began the international expansion of the Cosmo brand that would eventually reach one hundred countries where Hearst would team up with an established local magazine publisher.

  In Australia, Hearst chose ACP and the Cosmo deal was negotiated directly with Kerry Packer. A few months before the first issue was due to be published, Hearst changed its mind and instead signed with ACP’s rival publisher, Fairfax. Kerry was not happy. Kerry was really, really not happy.

  So he called a talented young journalist named Ita Buttrose into his office, gave her a copy of US Cosmopolitan and basically said, ‘Here, do this. Fast.’

  That’s how Cleo was born. Cleo launched in Australia in 1973, several months before Cosmo and was an instant, massive hit. Fairfax launched Cosmo and it was also successful but Cleo had the edge in the market as a fully homegrown product.