Airmail, page 9
Oh, you’ll doubtless take my advance notice that your career will soon pick up considerably as good news – and I’m glad if being wise to a little impending recognition cheers you up. But hold the champagne. Because we will merely swap one set of problems for another. The new problems aren’t superior to the old ones, either. On the contrary, the problems that confront a so-called ‘successful author’ may be grimmer than the travails you face now.
For these days we are constantly interrupted. We are ceaselessly asked to write journalism about which we will not care a jot a few days later; to support charity causes; to do public events at literary festivals; or to open libraries. To give interviews, to do photo shoots. If that sounds glamorous, it’s not. It’s a pain in the butt. Where before we floated on a sea of solitude, now we are jostled by a crowd every morning when we access our email queue. (What is email? Oh, my dear, you’ll find out all too well in time.) Don’t get me wrong, we don’t feel sorry for ourselves; why, that’s part of the problem. It’s official: we’re incredibly lucky. We’re not allowed to feel sorry for ourselves. Which is a massive drag. The right to self-pity should be enshrined in the Constitution.
As a consequence of all this distraction, our production has halved. It now takes twice as long to write a book as it takes you now. The other 50 per cent of our time is consumed by selling it.
Look, this is not to complain, exactly. It really is better, if we’re going go to the bother of writing the things, for a reasonable quorum of other people to read our books. It’s probably better not to live on the very edge of an economic precipice, so that when the toaster breaks the household isn’t plunged into hysteria. And it’s nice to have a bit more to do with other people, what with all these festivals and articles – we feel part of something larger now. It’s even good for our work that from time to time we have an actual conversation with someone else.
But because all that comes later, you need to appreciate what you already have. You may be embarrassed at parties because no one has ever heard of you, and clearly the repeated rejections of your manuscripts are tough. Still, I look back on the years you are living now, and I realise now that they constituted our prime. Why, in a novel you haven’t written yet, you will craft the following sentences: ‘Happiness is almost definitionally a condition of which you are not aware at the time. To inhabit your own contentment is to be wholly present, with no orbiting satellite to take clinical readings of the state of the planet. Conventionally, you grow conscious of happiness at the very point that it begins to elude you. When not misused to talk yourself into something – when not a lie – the h-word is a classification applied in retrospect. It is a bracketing assessment, a label only decisively pasted onto an era once it is over.’
In other words: You think you’re miserable. But you are far happier right now than you have any idea.
Warmly,
Lionel
There are quite a few people I could have written this letter to. There is – or there was – the group called Women Aglow (with the love of Christ) who were based somewhere in the Midwest of the United States. Or I could have written it to the advertising industry of New York. Or some of America’s leading manufacturers of products targeted at teenage girls. But, in the end, I decided to address this letter to our bankers. You were, after all, pretty key in ensuring that it didn’t work out.
In hindsight, you – and we – should have realised, almost as soon as it started, that it was not working out.
You will recall that the deal was finally signed at around 9 o’clock on the morning of 1 July 1988. You, and your lawyers, had spent the previous night on a high floor of the Pan Am Building, which straddled Grand Central Terminal, where about half-a-dozen rooms had been set aside for the ‘teams’ of lawyers, accountants and other hangers-on representing the various parties to the deal. The wrangling was extraordinarily acrimonious, as you know, and it was never clear to me why when you were all meant to be on our side.
As you will remember, it was complicated corporate events in faraway Australia that had led to Sassy and Ms., the two magazines we were running for John Fairfax & Sons (as it was then known), being put on the market. Sandra Yates, who had had the brilliant idea of talking Fairfax into letting her go to New York to launch an American version of Dolly, their very successful magazine aimed at teenage girls, and who had then persuaded them to buy Ms. magazine, had then had a third stroke of brilliance. ‘Give us an option to buy the two magazines,’ she’d put to our bosses back in Sydney. To our astonishment, they’d agreed. ‘We’ll take $14 million,’ they’d said.
Sandra had calculated that we’d need another $6 million in operating capital. Not much to run two monthly mass-circulation magazines in the intensely competitive US market, but the launch of Sassy, just a few months earlier, had been such a stupendous success that advertisers were falling over themselves to place orders. Our cash flow was impressive, you had commented with gleaming eyes.
Sandra and I had hired a magazine broker, and we’d busted our personal bank accounts by buying really expensive suits. ‘People don’t lend money to people who look like they need it,’ Sandra had correctly surmised. She had added, ‘Either we’ll pull this off or we’ll be the best dressed bag ladies in New York.’
We pulled it off.
After shopping ourselves to a succession of other media companies, we’d decided to go it alone, borrowing all the money we needed – from you, of course – and becoming, as I’d put it, ‘media mogulettes’. Not because we were women but because we were small.
One of you, the American one, provided most of the capital, while the other, the Australian one, came good with the ‘mezzanine debt’, a term I had not encountered before. Nor had I known anything about ‘due diligence’, a term that described the way we – still at that stage employees – were able to trawl through the accounts of John Fairfax, looking for chinks in their financial armour so we could extract the best possible terms.
Or so we were told. We had you, our bankers, your lawyers, our lawyers, Fairfax’s lawyers, our accountants, your accountants, our broker and someone running the Xerox machines nonstop while minions bustled in and out of the various rooms with coffee and sandwiches to keep us fuelled and awake through the long night.
Sandra and I, supposedly the reason for everyone being there, were made to feel superfluous as these advisors yelled at each other, threatened walk-outs over what seemed like miniscule matters and otherwise injected maximum machismo into the proceedings. I learnt later, from reading Michael Lewis and others who chronicled the ‘greed is good’ era, that aggression and sleeplessness were indispensible to deal-making. It had nothing whatsoever to do with us.
When the deal was finally signed, Sandra Yates and I were instantly famous. We had achieved just the second women-led management buyout in US corporate history. We were feted, even if there was some confusion about our company’s name. Had we named Matilda Publications as a tribute to Matilda Cuomo, the wife of New York’s governor? No one could quite fathom calling a company after a song about a suicidal sheep rustler.
As you recall, because you revelled in it, we were suddenly ‘it’. And, by association, so were you. Every door in New York swung open for us; our pictures were in Time magazine and the New York Times and New York magazine. Our lives were soon a glamorous swirl of lunches, cocktail parties, galas. Everyone wanted to meet us.
You had wanted only the brash and successful Sassy, the new darling of the New York magazine scene. We knew that, but we had made it a condition of the deal that you also take on Ms., the ailing feminist magazine that, astonishingly, Fairfax had agreed to buy just eight months earlier. With gritted teeth you had gone along with it: brash little Sassy would subsidise its somewhat stodgier older sister. We hoped that Sassy readers would grow up to be Ms. readers. It was a perfect fit, we thought.
Sandra and I were given a total of 40 per cent of the company, and while you two haggled over how to apportion the rest, the bottom line was that we were partners. Our quarterly repayment schedule was mapped out, and we all just sat back and waited for the money to keep on rolling in.
It was about six weeks later that it all fell apart. I was in Atlanta attending the Democratic Party convention and being thrilled to be meeting some of the biggest names in US politics. When I returned to my hotel room very late one evening there was an urgent message from Sandra. ‘Call,’ it said. ‘No matter how late.’
The news was that $25 million worth of advertising for Sassy, basically our entire cash flow, had been cancelled that day.
A small group of women in the Midwest who called themselves Women Aglow had been affronted by something one of them had seen, which she saw as promoting the idea of teenagers having sex. It was not even in the magazine itself but in a promotional mailer for Sassy that the teenage daughter of someone in the group had been sent.
As we’d explained to you many times while we negotiated our deal, Sassy’s editorial mission was to encourage girls to be responsible about sex. With the US having the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the world, it was obvious that a lot of girls that age were having sex. Sassy would speak to those girls, in their own language, and say, ‘Don’t rush into it, but when you do, please protect yourself against pregnancy.’
Women Aglow were not open to such distinctions. They called on the Rev. Jerry Falwell to help them organise a boycott of companies that advertised in Sassy. As you know only too well, what happened with alarming rapidity was that our top six advertisers panicked and cancelled all their business with us.
Even twenty-five years later, I am still unable to fathom why an advertiser like Tambrands, which makes Tampax, would be more swayed by the views of a small bunch of menopausal women than by the opportunity to reach several hundred thousand teenage girls who were making decisions about what brand of tampon they would buy for the next thirty years. Or why Revlon, supposedly a sophisticated international brand, would be influenced by a bunch of hicks. The same with a company that made jeans.
The advertiser boycott was so successful, as you will remember, that these people were sufficiently emboldened to begin a consumer boycott. They got Walmart to stop distributing Sassy. So we lost not just our advertising revenue, which, as you well knew from your due diligence, was the lion’s share of our revenue, but also our newsstand revenue.
We were unable to make our first repayment. Technically, and just three months into our deal, we defaulted.
You stepped in, no longer friends, our partnership now not worth the papers we’d signed. You appointed an outsider as an administrator while you started to look for ways to offload us. You bankers are for the good times, not for the times when it doesn’t work out.
Dear Willy,
You must be dead by now, but if you are up there somewhere, after all these years, I want you to know I forgive you.
When you joined our family you captured the hearts and souls of my mother and two older sisters. First you replaced me, from the privileged position as youngest, then competed with my little sister Zoe when she was born.
I was the apple of my father’s eye until you came along, but you even softened him. A wild man who left the city with his cousin in the 1930s to grow tobacco at the foot of the Grampian mountains. He would ride his old Harley Davidson, his cousin sitting pillion, with a sidecar to hold a sack of potatoes and his red setter dog. It leaned into the wind, ears flying and saliva lashing their faces as they hurtled towards town.
Once there they dumped their potatoes on the bar of the local pub in exchange for a night of drinking. But of course that was before our time, Willy. Although you always had a soft spot for the Grampians, didn’t you?
Our parents provided well for us from our farm, but they were modest beginnings, so whenever I would pose the question of whether I could have a birthday party the answer was always the same: we couldn’t afford it. Then finally when I was turning ten my mother decided I had received hospitality from so many other families that a party was necessary to repay their kindness, so our resources were pooled and I was to have a proper bash.
I had attended many parties so I knew how it was meant to go. Firstly soft drinks of all colours – cordial or homemade wouldn’t do, they had to be bought from Standbury’s Store, they must be fizzy.
My mother never seemed to get the colour factor. Whenever there was a school concert, the mothers supplied afternoon tea. My mother would always arrive late, just as the singing was finishing. I would look down from the stage in terror at what she might produce.
Everyone else’s mothers would bring spectacular contributions. A chocolate cake with vibrant pink icing, white trim, and a beautifully constructed blue bird in the middle has always stayed with me. But my mother would typically bring a naked greyish boiled fruitcake, or a limp thin sponge with nothing on it. I would be mortified as I heard my friends giggle.
However, once the decision for a party was made and the pressure was on, my mother became surprisingly compliant. I knew she had it in her. I had seen her drawings and paintings.
So the family rallied together and everyone was given a task while my mother prepared for the cooking.
I was allowed to invite whoever I wanted, but it was agony to decide who was more worthy than who, so I invited every girl in the class. While this was an easy way out, it now meant I had to lift my game.
At night I would lie awake stewing about the cakes, devising games or designing the treasure hunt, which was to be the jewel in the crown. I wrote little poems to be found in secret hiding places all around the farm, which would lead the finder to the next clue.
You would lie beside me on my bed watching silently while I wrote and mouthed my verses to you. But when I laughed with pleasure at my occasional successes, it seemed to excite you too, and I would soon be yelling to my mother that you had wet my bed, while my sisters shouted from their bedrooms to clean it up myself.
Other nights, while the family sat around the open fire in our living room, as we often did before we had electricity or television, I would grapple with the light from the flames to write my poems. But you would hog the fire, stretching full length along the mat to get the most heat, and someone would always say, ‘Do leave Willy alone, can’t you use the tilly lamp?’, which of course would be behind the chairs in the cold of the room.
When my birthday finally came I was excited beyond belief. My games were all set, the kitchen table had been pushed against the wall and draped in white sheets, and on it were rows of cakes and confectionary, more lovely than I had ever seen.
There was chocolate log with silver balls, pink and blue meringues, orange cake and rainbow cake. This entire spectacle came together in an extravagant centerpiece of a double-storey cochineal, lime and raspberry birthday cake with a blue bird on the top. I held my breath and stared wide-eyed. My mother had come through.
My excitement grew as I began to see how I was no longer going to be someone who didn’t quite fit in. But the day started badly. The board I had made to pin the tail on the donkey had been too hard for the pins, so the tails kept falling off. Then no one could guess what was under the cloth on the tray. The items I included were too hard to decipher, like the bits to my father’s drill. So we moved on to my coup d’état, the treasure hunt.
Under my instructions my father, with Zoe on his shoulders, had carefully concealed my poems around the yard and in the sheds, cow bail and horse yards, with the final poem bringing the trail back to the prize, which I had tucked away in the rain gauge just near where the hunt had started. I thought this was terribly clever, but within minutes someone had found the treasure before the hunt had even begun.
Being my father’s daughter, I beared up and blustered on as if no disappointment was big enough to thwart me. Fighting back tears I announced it was time for the birthday feast. I marched ahead to show the way, tailed by a mob of twenty sniggering girls.
As I stepped into the kitchen I drew to a halt, and stared in silent horror. The girls gasped as they packed in behind me and a deathly quiet descended as they took it in.
There you stood, Willy. My mother’s glorious centre piece in your hands, about to take a second bite before it slipped from your grasp, the icing cracking and crumbling, the little blue bird now hanging from its perch. I turned to the table and that’s when I broke.
You had picked up every item, taken a bite, then dropped it on the floor. And now you stood among it all, a multicoloured mass of crushed cakes, crumbs and cream, surrounding you like a flower garden in spring.
It was more than I could bear. I let out a guttural scream and somewhere in my wailing were the words, ‘I hate you, Willy! I hate you. You are not part of my family. You are just a stupid kangaroo!’
You stared at me, your big doe eyes full of fear, then dropped that beautiful concoction of culinary delights and turned, swinging your huge tail across the floor, creating a tornado of cochineal, lime and raspberry petals. And the little bird in flight among that wake of colour, landed as a splat of blue on the lino, as you leapt from the room.
After I was sent to boarding school to join my older sisters, Zoe was the only one left to spend time with you. Once she began primary school you would go with her to the gate to wait for the school bus. When it came she would try to push you home, but while she was getting on you would follow her and stand in front of the bus, and Zoe had to get off to coax you to move. In the afternoon you would be waiting again. When Zoe arrived you would put your arms around each other and head home together.
I was no longer there for you to follow my horse around the paddocks while I rode. You did go out with my father and the dogs behind the truck when he rounded up sheep, or you sat by the fire while he boiled a billy. But more and more the loneliness set in and you began to yearn for the mountains.
