Finally, I was back in New York. This time I had a job and my own apartment, in a doorman building on the Upper West Side. I took the subway to work, joining the tightly packed throng on the narrow platform at the 72nd Street station. I rode the express 2 or 3 train the one stop to Times Square and spilling out of the carriage at 42nd Street, strode purposefully towards the filthy narrow steps that led up to the chaos of people and traffic just above us in Times Square. Just like a real New Yorker, I told myself. Until I tried to order a black coffee at the deli near the office and was greeted with such hostility that I backed out of the place in bafflement. Later, someone explained that there was ‘coffee’, which was black, and there was ‘regular coffee’, which had milk. There would be many other such blunders before I could navigate the town with some ease, but I would always be a foreigner. My accent was a dead giveaway, so even after I’d learned most of the more obvious social cues, and although I began to feel more and more at home as the years rolled on, I realised I would never be able to find my way into the American imagination. That would remain as remote to me as any foreign nation’s. It was easy for we visitors to think we knew America because of our familiarity with its movies and television, its music and other cultural creations, but just because we thought we spoke the same language did not mean that we even began to comprehend this curious and infuriating country. The United States was a melting pot, no doubt about that, and New York was the most multicultural of cities where no one questioned your right to be there. If you had money or connections or a claim to fame you would be embraced, as I would discover, but you would never have the grace or certainty of a native. That did not mean you could not have a helluva time and from the moment I arrived at JFK Airport in March 1986, that is what I set out to do.
I was now in the New York I’d always craved. Not the edgy downtown of my first visit, or the elegant Greenwich Village of my most recent trip. I was now in Gotham City, with its canyons and cacophony and in-your-face capitalism. This was the real New York and I was enchanted. I could not wait to devour it. I had been appointed North American manager of John Fairfax & Sons, responsible for supervising the small local staff and overseeing what was then quite a sizeable syndication business. The Fairfax office was on the 24th floor of 1500 Broadway, a 1970s glass skyscraper overlooking Times Square. It was right across from a New York architectural masterpiece, the 1927 Paramount Building, with its distinctive dome and clock face, and a lobby modelled on the Paris Opera House, where a lot of entertainment companies were located. We were right in the middle of the Broadway theatre district, known as the Great White Way. The distinctive neon lights that lit up the fronts of many buildings were neither as ubiquitous nor as garish as they became after the transformation of Times Square following Mayor Rudolph Guiliani’s famous ‘cleanup’ of the area in the mid-1990s but even then they were the brightest lights of the biggest city. From my window I could look down on the famous news ticker running round the triangular-shaped white tile-clad building that was like a miniature version of the famous Flatiron Building, almost twenty blocks further south. Four blocks away to the north on West 47th street was the famous diamond district where I saw Hasidic Jews for the first time: men dressed all in black—hats, coats, gloves, with long, usually grey, beards—carrying attaché cases and seemingly bent slightly, as if against the wind. Four blocks south was the garment district where racks of clothes were in constant movement from factory to delivery, and where a sharp-eyed observer might spot a celebrity designer, a famous model or, best of all, one of the most powerful figures in New York: a fashion magazine editor.
Each of the Fairfax newspapers had their own correspondent who reported directly to their editors, so my responsibilities towards them were practically non-existent, but I was also North American editor for the Financial Review, writing news stories and a regular column as well as a weekly piece for the Natty Times, which had been renamed Times on Sunday. After a gap of three years, I hoped I could easily move back into writing. Not that I had any choice as I seemed to have burned my bridges. I had gone to Washington in April for Bob Hawke’s visit, and found that the bureaucrats who had been my colleagues just a few months earlier would not talk to me. But nor could I find much common ground with the Press Gallery; I could no longer fall in with their perpetual cynicism. I had views, and values, and no longer wanted to conceal these. I realised, yet again, that I was on my own, no longer part of any herd, but I did not care. I was all fired up. The New York Times was just half a block away, on West 43rd Street, and although I did not yet know anyone there, I felt inspired by its mere propinquity.
I already knew that there were many Americas. I would never experience ‘the awful realization’ of F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1932, when he climbed to the top of the recently completed Empire State Building and took in the view and saw that New York ‘was a city after all and not a universe’.1 He saw beyond the canyons of skyscrapers to the towns and the fields and rivers beyond ‘the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination’. The Jazz Age was over, the Wall Street crash had shattered the lives of millions, and the country was settling into a long Depression. But the man who had said there were no second acts in Americans’ lives, now saw that also was untrue. Instead, ‘from the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building’, the place of his epiphany, and evidence that America would never stop inventing itself, would never cease to amaze.
I had seen so much of this perplexing country during my previous visits, and met such a bewildering array of Americans, that I could never be tempted to easy generalisations about this place or its people. I wanted to find a way to write about America that would be engaging and informative and, above all, would not rely on the Yank-bashing stereotypes that Australians responded to so well. It was easy to make fun of America. I decided I would try to do something different. I was in the right place and, it seemed to me, the right time as the Reagan era wound down. I would be an eager observer as America repudiated the harshness of those free-wheeling, free-market years of monetarism and deregulation and moved back, politically, to what I hoped was a replica of its truer self, the country that had been able, through the sixteen years of the leadership of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to keep its people’s spirits alive during the hard years of Depression and war. Australia had turned its back on Malcolm Fraser after eight years of punitive conservative politics and embraced the fairer, more inclusive policies of Labor led by Bob Hawke. I hoped America was ready to do the same and here I was, on the ground, ready to tell the story. If that indeed was the story; the powers-that-be back in Sydney seemed to have other ideas.
‘The story,’ Max Suich had told me excitedly as he pursued me to leave government and come back to Fairfax, this time in New York, ‘the story in America is the capital markets.’ Suich was now Fairfax’s editorial director but he’d been a reporter before he’d become editor of the National Times and for him, ‘the story’ was the political or, to his mind more likely, the economic circumstances that defined that particular moment in the history of the place you were writing about. When he had represented the Financial Review in Tokyo in the late 1960s, ‘the story’ had been the iron ore negotiations between Japan and Australia. He’d covered the ongoing setting of prices and the determining of supplies that would define the trade relations between the two nations for decades to come, and which would cement Australia’s national wealth as being dependent on resources. Suich also covered the men who made this story, the miners such as Russell Madigan and Lang Hancock who had had the foresight to develop the ore and to seek out Japan, so recently our mortal wartime enemy, as a natural trading partner. Now, in New York, ‘the story’ was how the wide-scale deregulation, including of the financial markets, and the infatuation with monetary policy, was changing not just the broader US economy but the very way Wall Street operated. Bonds were now sexier than stocks and a new product—the junk bond—would soon emerge as one of the definitive errors of the era. Debt was king and leverage was the new way to easy wealth. Leveraged buyouts, or LBOs, as they were known, were the new way to buy and sell companies; debt was deployed against a company’s cash flow and assets, which were then broken up and sold to repay the debt. The average return on LBOs in 1986 was 40 per cent, according to Euromoney magazine. A 31-year-old computer nerd by the name of Bill Gates had just floated his software company, Microsoft Corp, on the stock exchange, earning himself an instant $350 million and then, sitting back, had watched the stock soar. The stock market was on a dizzying upward spiral. Money was the new god. Greed was good. The savings and loans crisis was starting to reveal itself. Where would it all end?
It was, as journalists say, quite a story. I could see that. I just wasn’t sure that it was the story that I wanted to be my main focus. I felt desperately unequipped, for one thing. Suich had arranged for me to be briefed by money market experts and foreign exchange dealers before I’d left Australia, but I had no natural feel for finance and economics. Although I had written for the Financial Review for five years before joining OSW, my subject had been politics, which I understood and enjoyed. A few years later, in 1989, when I read Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis, an eye-poppingly revealing insider account of the operations of a Wall Street investment banking firm in the late 1980s, I understood how compelling a story it was. By then, of course, the stock market had crashed, the junk bonds and savings and loan scandals had bankrupted thousands of small institutions and provided a grim foretaste of what was to come with the housing collapse that led to the global financial crisis in 2008. But Lewis’s books (he wrote several, all of them gripping) and others such as The Barbarians at the Gate had the benefit of being retrospective accounts. Although I could see the bigger picture of the dangers in what was happening, I had trouble understanding the story as it was unfolding. When I wrote about the economy or the financial system, I was more likely to approach these subjects the way I would a political story: look for the major issues and trends, identify the key players, and try to tell the story of what they were doing. I had no technical grasp, as was very clear when during an interview with Paul Volcker in late June 1986 I’d asked him a question about monetary policy.
‘I thought you were supposed to be a political writer,’ he’d said, indicating that I had no idea what I was talking about.
He was right. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve had agreed to this interview as a favour to Bob Hawke. As a parting gift to me the Australian Prime Minister had written letters of introduction to Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of State George Schultz and White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan, as well as Volcker. All but Regan had agreed to be interviewed, and although I was never able to pin down a time with Schultz, both Weinberger and Volcker made time to talk to me. Both interviews enhanced my journalistic reputation because Australian reporters usually did not have access to these top-ranking officials. I was extraordinarily lucky to have this kind of leg-up in my very early days as a correspondent in the US. The interview with Volcker was off-the-record. I could not quote him directly, although I could write with authority what he thought about the deregulation of the economy, mounting third world debt and other current economic issues. I was grateful to Volcker for his kindly tolerance, but embarrassed by my ignorance. By then I was able to write my way out of anything, so I produced a three-part series that passed muster, but while I did try to improve my understanding of ‘the story’, my heart was not in it. I made an effort to cultivate the bankers who made money out of Australia, but I could never think of what to ask them. I went to a briefing at Bain & Co on Australian capital markets. I learned that if I had some money, I could probably make some more. But I found the subject dull and I could not think of interesting or creative ways to write about it. Towards the end of my first year I’d attended the New York Financial Writers’ dinner, and soon afterwards a two-day seminar on debt at the Waldorf Astoria. It was another of those occasions where most people’s eyes glazed over when they heard my opening line, ‘Hi, I’m from the Australian Financial Review, it’s like the Wall Street Journal …’ No one cared. It wasn’t simply that I was female, although the finance world was astonishingly masculine in makeup and ethos. Janine Perrett, who was in New York for the Australian newspaper, was totally at ease with business and finance stories. We’d often go for drinks together but we would mostly talk about politics, a subject I felt far more at home with, or gossip about other expatriates. When it came to the capital markets, I simply felt out of place.
I was much more comfortable doing political stories, even an assignment as daunting as my interview with the US Secretary of Defence in early June 1986, a few weeks before I sat down with Volcker. Caspar Weinberger had got the nickname ‘Cap the Knife’ while serving in the Office of Management and Budget in Washington during the Nixon years, where he engaged in savage cost-cutting, including slashing the Defence budget. He had actually killed the B–1 bomber project, a move that enraged the Pentagon and which Nixon eventually reversed. Now, as Reagan’s Defence Secretary, he had presided over the largest military buildup in peacetime. He achieved a 51 per cent increase in real terms of the Defence budget to an astronomical $US293 billion, earning him the accusation that he was ‘a draft dodger in the war against the deficit’. He justified this about-face by saying he had been horrified to learn the extent of the Soviet Union’s arms buildup. He was not to know, of course, that within a mere three years of our interview the Soviet Union would cease to exist.
Weinberger was an interesting and cultured man, seemingly at odds with the ‘cowboy’ image of the rest of the Reagan administration. He was a renowned Anglophile, and he was devoted to art and literature; he went to concerts. He brought art into his office, including a bronze bust of General MacArthur and another of an infantryman, a daily reminder of the human cost of what he was undertaking. One of his first acts had been to remove the formal portrait of James V. Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defence, which hung behind his desk. Forrestal had committed suicide in 1949 while on the job, by jumping from a tower of the Bethesda Naval Hospital where he had been admitted for depression. Weinberger replaced the portrait with a 400-year-old Titian he borrowed from Washington’s National Gallery of Art. It was a large rectangular picture, using rich red, brown and cream colours, showing Cardinal Marco investing the Abbot of Carrara, with his benefice standing by. ‘I found him much more agreeable and soothing to the soul,’ Weinberger wrote later in his memoir, In the Arena: A memoir of the 20th Century. The Titian ‘resided’ in his office for the whole seven years he was Defence Secretary.
Weinberger’s term had not been without controversy. He was accused of being bewitched by the Pentagon and presiding over excessive waste in procurement. At the time of our interview, he had recently been publicly humiliated by President Reagan, who’d excluded him from a high-level meeting with Secretary-General Gorbachev, and then leaked Weinberger’s letter of complaint. And Congress had just passed the Gramm-Rudman amendment, requiring a zero deficit within five years. To achieve this would require brutal budget cuts with at least half of these coming from Defence; his big spending days seemed about to end. But on the day we met, nothing in his demeanour indicated that Caspar Weinberger had anything better to do than spend an hour giving his first-ever interview to an Australian newspaper. I’d been led along what seemed like miles of Pentagon corridors to his office where the Secretary was waiting for me. We sat at a small round conference table, just the two of us, and he gave me his undivided attention. He was remarkably across all details of the Australian alliance, scarcely referring to the thin briefing folder that lay in front of him, and he carefully ensured that he gave me a few items, about Star Wars, about Japan and about the US bases in Australia, that at the time were newsworthy. It was quite a coup for me, and the paper gave it massive coverage, including running a full transcript of the interview. And this time, I did not have to cover-up any gaffes.
After the formal interview was over, I found the nerve to ask him if I could look at the Titian. Weinberger led me over to his desk. Behind it was a huge desktop panel of lights and switches. It resembled the flight deck of a modern jetliner, except that it was two or three times as large.
‘That’s Western Europe,’ he told me.
He was pointing to an area of the panel where several green and orange lights were illuminated. He did not elaborate, but I later learned that this was a massive secure telephone system that enabled him to speak to those under his command anywhere in the world as well as to his political colleagues in Washington. Beside it was the red phone that only the President used. On the wall above the panel was the painting. How appropriate to the politics of the Potomac. The Cardinal, epitomising the power of his era, at that time exercised by the Catholic Church, keeping watch over the man in charge of the most powerful military force in the world.
I lived at 253 West 73rd Street in The Level Club, built in 1927 as a Masonic hotel. The lavish façade of the building was designed to replicate King Solomon’s Temple, and the huge foyer was decorated with Masonic symbols.2 It had been converted to condominium apartments just two years earlier, so I was lucky to be in a marvellous neo-Romanesque building that nevertheless had modern bathrooms and kitchens. I’d rejected the Fairfax apartment as being too small and dingy, overlooking a light well. I wanted to be able to look out my window and see New York, I’d told Suich. I’d scanned newspaper advertisements and, luckily for me, not having done any kind of research on the area, I had stumbled on the perfect place. It was just two blocks to Riverside Park and the Hudson River, and three blocks in the other direction to Central Park. Scarcely a Sunday passed when I did not join the multitudes who descended on the park to walk, sunbake, roller-skate, bike, jog, picnic, read or otherwise chill-out in the designated quiet zones or, in the rest of the sprawling park where noise was as natural as the greenery, engaged in the endless forms of exhibitionism that New Yorkers called relaxation.
Food shopping was something else. I had never experienced such choice when it came to food, nor the theatre that was part of the service. At Zabar’s, the legendary Jewish delicatessen on Broadway at 80th street, you joined the crush of shoppers for cured meats and fish and whether you ordered one ounce or five pounds, you were shouted at just the same by the men skillfully running their knives across sides of salmon or ladling out dollops of Sevruga. I once stood next to a woman wearing a sable coat who asked for a pound of Beluga as casually as I’d ordered my small container of whitefish salad. She was jostled just like the rest of us as she gave over her hundreds of dollars before the precious purchase was handed to her over the high glass counter. ‘Next!’ yelled the man who had served her.
Just around the corner from my apartment, on Broadway at 74th Street, was Fairway, with its distinctive blue and black striped awning, one of the best food markets in the city. You could get day-old Israeli tomatoes or corn torn from the earth on Long Island that very morning; if you waited long enough on the Bread Line you had dozens of types of what today is called artisan bread to choose from. And there were cheese and meats and anything else you might feel like. Out the front were the big boxes of slightly less fancy fruit and vegetables. As you paid, you had to tell the young Hispanic women who ran the registers, Inside or Outside. Even inside, the prices were bargain basement compared with what I had paid in Canberra for a far inferior range and quality. There were some things, such as fresh salmon, you simply could not get in Australia. Nor the way New Yorkers were constantly demonstrating their brashness, their humour and their sheer chutzpah. Every encounter became a drama. No issue was too tiny to attract belligerence and over-the-top aggression. At times it was confronting and exhausting. No one gave an inch and nobody gave a damn and people would fight over the smallest thing. I was in the line at Fairway one day when the register clerk asked a woman with a large shopping basket of goods where she had got the apple she was munching.
‘Inside, or outside?’
‘I didn’t get this apple here,’ the woman replied. ‘I brought it in with me’.
The clerk did not believe her, people in the line did not believe her. The murmurs began.
‘Give it a rest, lady.’
‘Just pay for the fucking apple.’
But, no, she was not going to give it up.
‘I’ve got the receipt,’ she said. ‘It’s in my car’.
And off she went, leaving the ever-lengthening line yelling in protest.
She returned triumphantly a few minutes later with a tiny piece of paper she claimed was the receipt. She did not pay for the apple. That’s chutzpah.
The Ansonia, one of the most remarkable buildings in New York, was right next door to The Level Club. Built at the turn of the twentieth century, it opened as a hotel in 1904. Eighteen stories high, built of pale-grey stone, the Ansonia is arguably the most extravagant beaux-arts building in New York. Unlike the usual early twentieth century New York grand buildings with their straight lines, and stepped levels, the Ansonia was all curves and carvings, gargoyles and cast-iron filigree. It was, without doubt, one of the most amazing buildings in a city that was not shy about its architectural largesse. Its lavish exterior was part of the architectural tour of New York buildings given by the Sam Waterston character in Woody Allen’s 1986 film Hannah and her Sisters and in 1992, while I was still living next-door, Single White Female starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Bridget Fonda was filmed inside. The building became very run-down in the mid-twentieth century, but rents were cheap because they were controlled or stabilised so artists and musicians, who liked that Lincoln Centre was just a few blocks to the south, took apartments there. The great soprano Teresa Stratas lived there. I’d heard her sing Liu in Turandot at the Met and I’d seen her in the street. Igor Stravinsky and the tenor Enrico Caruso are supposed to have lived there, as well as other luminaries such as Babe Ruth, Theodore Dreiser, Jack Dempsey and, more recently but before she became a mega-celebrity, Angelina Jolie.
Soon after I moved into The Level Club, I went into the Ansonia and approached the rather large man who was presiding over the lobby. The place was well past its glory days by the mid-1980s, but the grandeur of the building could never be diminished. I looked up in awe at the vaulted ceilings and the elaborate pillars. I said to the concierge that I had seen the sign outside for the baths.
‘Were they open to non-residents,’ I asked? I’d been hoping I could keep up my swimming in New York.
The man gave me a long look, as if to say, ‘You serious, lady?’ He took in my straight face and then, rolling his head back, he laughed and laughed. His face was a moist roll of merriment; he dabbed at himself with a handkerchief and heaved his shoulders as another round of laughter overtook him. I stood there politely, waiting for him to tell me what inexcusable crime of etiquette I had committed.
‘Those baths, lady,’ he told me, still gasping with laughter, ‘Those baths. They ain’t here anymore, but if they were, you sure wouldn’t want to be going to them.’
And off he went again, into another private paroxysm of mirth.
I soon discovered my mistake.
The Ansonia had been home to the now-fabled Continental Baths, the most famous gay bathhouse in New York, which had opened in the basement in 1968. For seven years the Continental Baths was the place to go for hip New Yorkers. And not just for gay men, although it was the first place in New York where they could congregate openly, white towels around their waists, to seek out sex. But the likes of Mick Jagger and Liza Minnelli went as well. It was, apparently, quite a place. As well as the actual baths, there was a health clinic (where patrons could be tested for STDs), a library, a juice bar, a barber shop, a souvenir shop, a café and a gym. But the biggest drawcard, apart from the sex, was the live entertainment. The Continental Baths attracted the biggest names in town: Cab Calloway, Sarah Vaughan, the Andrews Sisters, Lesley Gore and, perhaps not surprisingly, Peter Allen. It was a place that made careers, too. Bette Midler got her start here, with Barry Manilow tickling the ivories as she sang, as did Patti LaBelle. In 1977, two years after the Continental Baths closed, Studio 54 would become the new haven of the fashionable. And, as the disco era took hold, the music definitely took a turn for the worse.
Almost every block in New York had a good story and as I embraced my new city with fervour I wanted to learn as much as I could, to learn its history as well as savour the present. I had never lived anywhere like it. For instance, St Marks Place, the three blocks of East 8th street that run from Astor Place to Tompkins Square, was still a relatively poor block with cold-water tenements and shops that, apart from the very cool St Mark’s bookshop that had been a fixture since 1977, ranged from bodegas to head shops to tatty tourist kiosks but it had, even by New York standards, a pretty amazing pedigree. James Fenimore Cooper had lived there in the 1840s; in 1917 Leon Trotsky had moved into No. 77 and written for the Novy Mir, a Russian-language communist newspaper which was edited by Russian anarchist Nikolai Bukharin who lived across the street in No. 80. A few years earlier, Russian anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman started the progressive Modern School at No. 6. When that closed, it was replaced by a Russian public bath and in 1979 became the world’s largest gay bathhouse. In the 1950s, when the area started to become known as the East Village, it was a renowned hangout of the Beats, with Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg regulars at Gem Spa, a little bar on the corner of Second Avenue that sold newspapers and is renowned for its egg-cream, a peculiarly New York drink of milk, seltzer water and chocolate syrup. In Just Kids, Patti Smith recounts Robert Mapplethorpe buying her an egg-cream at the Gem Spa. Five Spot, at No. 2, was a jazz haunt in the early 1960s where musicians like Thelonius Monk, Charlie Mingus and Charlie Parker all played, and early feminist writer Shulamith Firestone, author of The Dialectic of Sex, lived at No. 11. And while St Marks Place has been home to an eclectic range of musicians, political types and social rebels—from Andy Warhol who opened his Electric Circus there in 1967 to Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the Yippies movement and Lenny Bruce the comedian—by far the most famous resident was the English poet W.H. Auden who lived at No. 77, for twenty years from 1952 to 1973. It was far from salubrious; for instance, it had no toilet, forcing Auden to use the facilities at the Holiday Cocktail Lounge at No. 75. It was a place that he frequented in any case, as he did like a martini. David Hay, one of my oldest friends, who had made documentary films in Australia and studied at the UCLA Film School in the early 1970s, moved to New York in 1979 and while he contemplated how to jump-start his screenwriting career, took up freelance journalism. He moved into No. 77 in 1983, and for three years lived in Trotsky’s old apartment. He was there the day the commemorative plaque for Auden was attached to the front wall of the Holiday. Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood were there, David told me, ‘I remember looking out my window and seeing them down on the sidewalk.’
My reverie with New York lasted for less than two months. To my horror I discovered that, once again, I was pregnant. It was, I realised, the result of a one-night stand with a visiting Australian with whom I would never dally again, and whom I could never tell. I knew I had no choice about what to do, although it was going to be a challenge to get myself an abortion in New York City—and probably very expensive—but the hormones had already started to kick-in, and I found myself emotionally connecting to what was happening inside me. But, I told myself, there was no way I could have a baby. It might just have been possible the last time I’d been pregnant, in 1979 when I was working in the Press Gallery. Life in Canberra was a lot simpler and support services were on hand, but I’d rejected that choice. I had put myself and my new job first. Had I chosen differently then, today I’d be the single mother of a six-year-old, and no way would I have this job in New York. Now I was 41 and this was probably my last chance, so I had to think very hard about whether I wanted this child. I’ve never been very clucky or defined myself solely, or even at all, by my ability to bear a child, so I could be a lot more dispassionate than would have been possible for some women. Looking back through my diary I realised that I had probably got pregnant around the time of Simone de Beauvoir’s death on 14 April 1986: ‘A very sad day for women,’ I’d written. ‘Her contribution to the explosion of our consciousness was extensive and profound.’ De Beauvoir herself never had an abortion, although she famously signed a petition of French women ‘confessing’ to having broken this law, but she did not hesitate to do whatever it took to put her work first and I would do the same. I wanted to stay in New York and to further hone my craft. I had the biggest assignment of my life in just a few weeks. I could not begin to imagine dealing with morning sickness while I interviewed the US Defence Secretary. I was a writer, I told myself, not a mother. Some women could be both, but not me. I found a gynaecologist on Park Avenue, a wonderfully sympathetic man, a recent immigrant from South Africa, who told me that in my situation—single, newly arrived in America, with a big job—I would be crazy to even consider having the child. I found his words consolingly reinforcing. I had not confided my situation to anyone, preferring to guide myself unaided through this decision. I knew I was doing what was right for me, but that did not mean that I was not sad—and angry. A week later, after the termination, I walked out through the waiting room, which was full of expectant couples. I wondered if they realised that the doctor who was to deliver their babies also did abortions—and would they care? It was behind me now, but I could not overcome my feelings of bitterness and resentment. Men never had to make these decisions. They simply walked away from the bed, usually oblivious to the chaos they had left behind. The man I refused to call ‘the father’ (I did not think that merely depositing sperm entitled someone to a title that implies effort and commitment) probably occasionally looked back on our night together with a secret little smile. As for me, I treated myself, maxing out my credit card buying three pairs of Bruno Magli stilettos. I had made my choice; it was done. For a time at least, I would be fabulously frivolous. That was my way of asserting that I was back in control of my life. I felt, in the words of the Joni Mitchell song, unfettered and alive.
In July 1986, just a month after the Weinberger interview, I was scheduled to talk with Opposition Leader John Howard. I had booked a fancy restaurant in Washington DC for my dinner with him, hoping it would not be too noisy because he had indicated that he was going to have some things to say. I’d seen him the previous night at a private dinner in New York hosted by Australia’s Consul-General, John Taylor, at the plush Beekman Place apartment that went with the job, and attended by a small number of investment bankers and their wives. I was the only journalist present. I’d been startled to see the way that these bankers, especially the Managing Director of Morgan Stanley, put Howard through his paces. He had looked uncomfortable and had not performed well.
‘That man has no faith in himself,’ remarked the wife of one of those who attended as they drove me home.
I disagreed with that assessment. John Howard was not impressive, but he was ambitious and he was game. He was clearly surprised at the tough time he was being given by these men who would, to a large degree, determine Australia’s financial standing in the world markets, but he did not shirk the questions or dissemble. I actually found it horrifying to see these men—these bankers—treat a putative Australian Prime Minister as if he were a schoolboy taking a test. He had, after all, been the Treasurer of Australia for six years until the change of government in 1983. The men at this table had already decided to back Vice-President George Bush as the next President. They were utterly confident their wishes would prevail. Wall Street was coming back into the political game in ways that had not been seen since President Roosevelt curbed its influence following the excesses that led to the 1929 crash. Perhaps I did need to pay more attention to what was happening there.
During our dinner in Washington John Howard acknowledged that he was not popular but he felt that might actually be an advantage. People would turn to him because, like his political heroes Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, he would not be afraid to take tough action which, he argued, people were starting to realise was needed. He was earnest and spoke with conviction as he told me he thought there was an enormous sense of disappointment in Bob Hawke developing in Middle Australia. ‘If there’s a realisation that things are crook and that changes are needed,’ he said, ‘there can be quite a significant change in public opinion.’
‘The times will suit me,’ he said.3
I hoped fervently that my tape-recorder, sitting in the breadbasket between us, had picked up this phrase. The restaurant was far noisier than I had anticipated. Howard had confirmed that we were having an on-the-record interview and he had given careful thought to what he was saying. The phrase ‘the times will suit me’ became forever associated with him. It would continue to be quoted the whole time he was in public life, although not always in the way he had meant. It was used to mock him when Andrew Peacock deposed him as Liberal Party leader in 1989. It would be ten years before John Howard became Prime Minister of Australia and by then the times were indeed very different, but he was nothing if not adaptable, and he recalibrated himself to accommodate them and went on to win three elections, becoming one of Australia’s longest-serving Prime Ministers. His ‘the times will suit me’ interview with me remained an early defining moment in Howard’s dogged journey to the top.
In August 1986 I went to San Francisco, to cover a meeting of what had been known as ANZUS (the Australian, New Zealand and United States alliance). At this meeting the US formally suspended its security obligations to New Zealand, following that country’s refusal to allow nuclear-powered US ships into NZ waters. Since the US had a policy of declining to declare which ships were under such power, the refusal amounted to a banning of American ships from NZ. The US reacted swiftly and strongly: New Zealand is ‘a friend, but not an ally’, declared President Reagan. So it was just Australia and the US at this meeting, and it was a very big story.
I loved the elegant architecture of San Francisco; the rollercoaster-like dips in the streets and the harbour with its Golden Gate Bridge forming a backdrop to the city views, just like in Sydney. American cities each had their distinctive styles. You would never confuse, say, Chicago with New Orleans or Boston with Los Angeles. In Australia, once you left the inner-city, the suburbs tended to meld into an homogenous sameness. San Francisco was divided into distinct districts: Chinatown, the Tenderloin, the Castro, Haight-Ashbury. I especially liked the Italian district, where in 1906 the local merchants had helped put out the Great Fire with casks of wine. Or so it was said. I went to Tosca’s, a coffee bar where the jukebox played only operatic arias—and Patti Page. I felt absurdly patriotic to find Joan Sutherland among the opera singers.
I met up with Kim Beazley who, like me, had arrived a day early. I’d known Beazley reasonably well in Canberra, and liked him for his openness and his intellectual curiosity. I had thought that we would probably just stroll around the tourist areas but while in the United States Beazley, who was now the Australian Defence Minister, came with a black stretch limo and a Secret Service detail, so we saw the sights in style. I was amazed that the long vehicle was able to negotiate the notorious serpentine-like turns of Lombard Street. Each time we got out of the car to inspect something, or to duck into a café, the Secret Service men followed at a discreet distance. That did not matter until Beazley got the idea that he wanted to visit the famous City Lights Bookstore, opened in 1953 by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the renowned hangout of the Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg and writers such as Jack Kerouac. It did not look good arriving at such a place in such a car. It looked even worse when the Secret Service guys, with their buzz cuts and their walkie-talkies and earpieces, came into the bookshop with us. Beazley was fascinated by the place and spent a good hour browsing, including a fair bit of time in the Marxist section. The other patrons were astonished but managed to contain whatever outrage they felt at this intrusion by the enemy. Beazley made a few purchases, including a book on the justification for war. I could not help but compare Beazley and Weinberger, two men running Defence departments, at a time when global military tensions were high, who both had interests and curiosities beyond the responsibilities of their jobs. Perhaps this accounted for Beazley’s unusual approach to his. I don’t think any other Defence Minister had asked his department for a paper on the moral justification for war.
Although I loved the Level Club, I was worried about how much it was costing me. I had underestimated the cost of living when I’d negotiated my salary. I was paying 60 per cent of my income in rent and I had to pay city, state and federal income taxes as well as social security and other deductions. I had to buy furniture for the apartment and I was finding it impossible to get by. I had not been this poor since I was seventeen living in Melbourne, and having to choose between having lunch or taking the tram to work. I had savings in Australia but I was reluctant to use them to subsidise my life in New York, especially as the exchange rate was terrible. Nor, I told myself, should I have to. I was earning what should be good money. It was having the security of a salary that had prompted me to come to New York, but in January 1987, although my pay was increased 3 per cent, all of it was taken up by Reagan’s tax ‘reforms’, and I was notified my rent would increase by $50 a month. I would have to find somewhere cheaper.
I looked at an apartment at 14 West 10th Street, an elegant tree-lined street that was supposedly one of the best blocks in the entire city, in the heart of Greenwich Village. Mark Twain had lived in this house for a year in 1900. The apartment was elegant and light-filled, occupying the entire ground floor of the brownstone. It was the kind of place that New Yorkers lusted after. I was told I was extraordinarily lucky to even have a chance to bid for it. Yes, I would have to dip into my savings to pay the unrefundable ‘key money’ if my application to rent the place was successful, but at $1500 a month it was considerably less than the $2000 I was currently paying. Even so, I hesitated. I liked the security of a doorman building, and it meant my mail and dry-cleaning would be looked after when I was travelling, even if the doormen were sometimes a little too inquisitive and, on one occasion when I brought an African-American man home, judging by the way he looked at me, censorious. Back in the Village, trying to picture myself living at ground-floor level, I found myself knowing I’d never feel safe. I decided I’d stay on the Upper West Side, look for ways to economise, and ask Suich if he would increase my rent allowance. It was in so many ways the right decision. My financial circumstances would change dramatically before the end of the year, enabling me to buy an apartment in the Level Club; it would be the only address I ever had in New York. But, more saliently, I was spared living in the building where an act of unspeakable violence took place later that year.
The numbers of homeless people in New York horrified me. Many of them slept on the streets, even in the coldest weather. There were as many as ten people, bundled-up against the weather, most of them men, and African-American, just on the one block between my apartment and the subway station. They would rattle cups in the hope of attracting some change. At night, human bundles seeking shelter and rest were in every doorway. It was confronting but I felt impotent. How were you supposed to respond? Choose one person and become his regular donor? Spread around whatever you felt able to share? As an Australian, I strongly believed it was the government’s responsibility to provide shelter and other services, but I was in the US now. Things were different here. There was also a lot of street crime and I learned to be alert and defensive. I once found a man’s fingers inside my bag as I joined the crush of people threading their way into the 72nd Street subway. When I removed his hand, he just kept moving, avoiding eye contact or any acknowledgement that he’d been trying to pickpocket me. It was a little more dramatic the time I was mugged. I had broken my own rule of being constantly alert, and was strolling along my own street, just a few metres from my front door, my head in the clouds when I heard a terrible scream. I soon realised the noise was coming from my own mouth and that I was reacting instinctually to a man who, standing close behind me, had a knife near my throat as he slashed the strap and made off with my shoulder-bag. It was over in seconds. He’d ran back to his car which—incredibly—was idling right there in the street, holding up the traffic, and sped off. People came from everywhere to help and I quickly recovered my composure. I was upset, of course, because almost everything of value I possessed was in that bag, along with a lot of cash because I was taking a trip the next morning. I was surprised how seriously the police treated what I assumed was a run-of-the-mill mugging. I went to the precinct and was shown mug shots; I was given a crime number: it was 60 something.
‘Is that how many crimes have been committed in the city so far this year?’ I asked. It was New Year’s Day.
The officer looked at me as if to say, ‘Get real, lady.’
‘That’s the number of crimes so far today in this precinct,’ he said.
But not even this crime could daunt my enthusiasm for the city. Apart from the everyday theatre of the street, the best thing about living in New York was the ease with which you could see, hear and even meet some of the most powerful, creative or just plain interesting people of the era. I’d attended the wedding of Hester Eisenstein, an American who’d lived in Sydney for some years and become involved in the women’s movement. She had written a book on the phenomenon of femocrats. Hester’s was the first wedding of a contemporary (rather than, say, a brother) that I’d attended since the 1960s. No one I knew got married anymore. It was also my first Jewish wedding, and I was fascinated by the rituals including the stamping on the glass, but I was even more impressed to learn that Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy were among the guests. I’d written an undergraduate essay on their 1966 classic Monopoly Capital, whose extensive documentation of the Yankee invasions, takeovers and coups against elected governments in Latin America in the service of American capitalism had made it a bible of the student left. And now I would have a chance to meet these two god-like figures. Someone pointed them out. I suppose I did not exactly expect them to be wearing black berets and smoking cheroots, but I certainly could not reconcile the two balding fat men in suits sitting on the other side of the room with the romantic figments of my youthful imagination.
New York is never boring, but sometimes it outdoes itself. In one magic week, in early November 1986, I went, in a state of giddy enthralment, from one amazing event to another. First, on Saturday afternoon, I had gone to an intimate benefit at the Juilliard School and heard both Isaac Stern and Yo-Yo Ma play. At drinks afterwards, I met the Australian architect Harry Seidler, who was in town to work with Donald Trump on the New York property tycoon’s bid for the Sydney casino. Then I was introduced to James Wolfensohn, the Australian expatriate of many years, a real Renaissance man who as well as being a leading investment banker, played the cello, would preside over the restoration of Carnegie Hall and, later in 1995, become President of the World Bank. On Tuesday I’d gone to a foreign correspondents’ event and heard the great economist J.K. Galbraith talk about the military power of the Superpowers. I was astonished to find that he was 78 (which I thought then was very old) and that not only was he amazingly lucid but he had a liberal outlook that was becoming so rare as to be almost extinct in America in the mid-1980s. Then on Friday I had interviewed the French film director Jean-Jacques Beineix, whose new film Betty Blue I’d watched at a private screening a few days earlier. Betty Blue went on to get on Oscar nomination and win various awards, but my real interest in Beineix was that he had directed the cult classic Diva. I felt quite the fan girl sitting down with him at the Parker Meridian Hotel. And then there was the morning when working my way through the Sunday New York Times I’d spotted a small notice about a workshop performance of a new Terrence McNally play that afternoon. An hour later, having paid my $12, I was sitting in the first row at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Right in front of me were F. Murray Abraham and Kathy Bates, in bed together, and about to begin their performance of Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. I knew Abraham from his sullen Salieri in the 1984 Milos Forman movie Amadeus, always bitter at being outshone by the mercurial Mozart, but I had not then heard of Kathy Bates. In 1990 she would win an Academy Award, playing a deranged fan in the adaption of Stephen King’s book Misery, the first of many notable movie performances. Back on stage, the actors suddenly flung back the covers and Abraham leapt out of bed and, stark naked, began to pace around the stage. John Malkovich was doing the same in Burn This, another off-Broadway play that was running in New York at the time, and which also would go on to become a smash hit on Broadway, but I was startled to see stage nudity for the first time. You’re not in Canberra anymore, I told myself.
I was grateful to be able to have these uplifting experiences after a gruelling visit from my parents a week earlier. I’d flown to London to meet them, together we’d gone on a driving tour of Ireland and then to New York, where I had planned to show them all the sights. They had never visited before. But my father was not well. In April 1986—just three weeks after I’d arrived in New York—he learned that he had prostate cancer. The recommended treatment was for his testicles to be removed, I learned from a panicked phone call from my mother very early one morning. He became immensely depressed about this.
‘I’ve been knackered,’ he used to say.
Whether it was the cancer, or losing his manhood, but the fight went out of him. He suddenly became old and I was shocked to see how frail he was. He was just a couple of years older than I am today, yet he seemed elderly. It was awful to watch the power ebbing out of him. It was something that I had observed with almost ghoulish pleasure in once-powerful politicians or businessmen: men who had once used their power in brutish fashion and who were now old and weak and vulnerable and who embodied the fact that power accrues to the position—not the person. Once they were no longer Prime Minister, or Secretary of Defence, or chairman of BHP or whatever powerful position they had once held, these men changed. Sometimes they became bitter and angry about their diminished authority, but often they were transformed into kindly and likeable people who were unrecognisable from their previous selves. Why wasn’t it possible for them to be this way when they still had power? Why is our notion of power associated with meanness, even cruelty? Why is so much masculine ego invested in the idea of palpable power? You see it in so many ways: the father who must hold sway over his children, the husband who must dominate his wife, sometimes using violence to assert his control. It is a model of authority that damages us all, men themselves as well as the women who suffer the effects, that is the basis of war and other forms of violence, and it was something, we were to discover, that lurked powerfully in our family. A man who is a kind and considerate leader is often denigrated as weak or ineffectual. A women leader who tries to subvert the model, well we know what happens to her. Even though I felt this way, about the system and many of the individual men who epitomised it, I was nevertheless overcome with sadness to watch my father’s diminishment.
The trip was difficult. My father could not walk easily, nor could he hear well, so conversation was hard. He needed to urinate frequently and it was not easy finding public restrooms in New York. ‘Freud made the same complaint,’ I assured him. We frequently had to stop at a bar and order three Cokes just so that my father could relieve himself. But he and my mother had managed to enjoy their first visit to the Big Apple. They surprised even themselves by catching the subway and meeting me at our appointed destination. We’d done the touristy things like the over-sized sandwiches at the Stage Deli, and visited the top of the World Trade Center, but my father’s favourite moment had been a performance of Madame Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera. He’d become quite emotional at being in such a famous place, hearing one of the operas he loved most. We had cheap seats but it was still a magical experience, watching the crystal chandeliers being drawn-up before the curtain rose.
On 17 October my parents attended Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, to mark the tenth anniversary of Jamie’s death. When they returned to my apartment, my mother kept making references to Jamie but I found that I was unable to respond. I was scared of where the conversation might lead. If we talked about Jamie and his death, we would need to acknowledge what was happening to my father, and if we did that, I knew I would have to confront the resentment and anger that I still harboured towards him. Although on the surface things between us might have seemed normal, in reality they were not. I was unable to forget, or forgive, the brutal hostility he’d shown towards me year after year when I was a teenager, nor the torrid scene on my wedding day in 1967, when he’d called me a ‘whore’ in front of my friends. Although, I told myself, it was all a long time ago, it still hurt. So we did not talk about his illness or his prognosis. We did not talk about what would happen if he became very ill or started to die. As I watched him struggle to stand and to walk, and saw his face reveal how sick he was, I realised that he did not have long to live. Yet we found ourselves incapable of expressing our fears, we were unable to offer him any consolation, and we certainly were unable to put into words how we felt about each other. We had always been this way and we had not changed. All I could do was hug him and offer platitudes that I was not sure that I really meant. I realised that my resentments ran deep, and while I now felt sorry for him and was scared about what lay ahead, I had not been able to find it in myself to start the conversation we needed to have. But then at JFK Airport as I said goodbye, my mother began to weep and then my father totally collapsed into terrible tears, and it became clear that he thought that he would never see me again. Four months later, I got the call I was dreading. The cancer had spread throughout his body, my mother told me over the crackling phone-line. It was now just a matter of time.
Being a foreign correspondent in New York was a much harder job than I had supposed it would be. I got very little direction from my editors—when I could speak to them. Communications were still amazingly primitive—it could sometimes take up to six hours to get a phone circuit via the international operator—and the top editors were either not there or too busy to talk. We correspondents were pretty much on our own. Malcolm Maiden had come to New York to cover business—including Wall Street—for the Financial Review, which was a big relief for me as he was far better qualified to cover the story and I was back in my comfort zone, writing about politics which meant I travelled frequently to Washington DC. I had a White House press pass and could attend press briefings. The Secret Service had evidently not checked the address I’d given on my application, which was just as well because I did not live there, but security was not much of an issue in those days. Without further introductions from an Australian Prime Minister, I was never again able to secure interviews with people of the calibre of Volcker and Weinberger. In fact, it was almost impossible to talk to anyone from the administration in Washington. Coming from a small and reliable ally certainly had its disadvantages when it came to getting stories. Sometimes I even had difficulty getting the State Department desk officer on the phone. When I looked back over my first year in the US, I had managed a few decent interviews and had broken a few small stories, but I had not been able to develop my writing as I’d hoped this foreign posting would allow. I had been unable to find a way to write about America and Americans in the way that I had planned when I’d first arrived. More and more, I had to settle for covering Australians. Which is not to say it wasn’t fun to be writing about Midnight Oil, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra or Circus Oz, or to be keeping an eye on what Australian businessmen were up to. Rupert Murdoch, who was expanding his US businesses, was usually good for a story but it was not what I had set out to do. I was always on the lookout for ways to write what I’d seen as my prime objective: understanding America. But it was not easy. To most Americans, Australia was either exotic or inconsequential. Everyone wanted to go there, they said, although their first preference usually was New Zealand, which had done a much better job marketing itself to Americans than we had. In the 1970s when I’d been in the Midwest, people politely told me they’d read or seen the movie The Thornbirds. In 1987 the point of reference was another movie, one that in the US was marketed as ‘Crocodile’ Dundee, the quote marks to indicate it wasn’t a swamp movie. It wasn’t much of a connection, and it certainly was not much of a lure when I put in interview requests. This meant I could not even just report, as there was simply no way to be able to meet a wide-enough range of Americans. Perhaps being located in New York made it even more difficult. I was nothing but a fringe-dweller. Observing only from the periphery, neither a native nor an immigrant. Not knowing the place the way people who were born there; and not striving for a stake, and being willing to set aside criticisms, as immigrants had to do. I simply did not belong.
After two years in New York I could no longer hide my frustrations. I loved the city but not my job, and my personal life was miserable. My several longstanding American friends tended to travel a lot. Paula Weideger had fallen in love with Henri Lessore, an Englishman, and she now spent a lot of time in London. Margot Fox, who I’d met through my ex-husband John Summers, was also on the road constantly in her job as French interpreter for the State Department. When she was in town she was always a lot of fun and, more than once, treated us to the fringe benefits of the job. One remarkable night she took me and a couple of friends to the Blue Note, where Dizzie Gillespie was playing. She had just escorted him on a tour of francophone Africa and he showed his appreciation by getting us good seats and sitting with us after his performance. He asked me for a cigarette. Smoking was forbidden, of course. He did not care and no one was going to stop him, but I did not dare light up. Mostly I hung out with other Australians, those like me who were working temporarily in New York, and my old friends David Hay, Phillip Frazer and Elisabeth Wynhausen, who had moved to the US, perhaps permanently. Elisabeth and I spent a lot of time together, including the day in early November when we’d used our press passes to get to the finishing line of the New York Marathon in Central Park. We’d given Robert de Castella a big, raucous Aussie cheer. He’d been injured and was struggling but he gave us a grateful grin and, we told ourselves, we’d helped him get over the line—in second place. And there was the never-ending stream of Aussie visitors, some of them family or friends who I was pleased to see, others I scarcely knew but who thought they could avail themselves of my services as a tour guide of the Big Apple. I soon learned to rebuff such people. I’d had a few flings and one-night stands with people passing through but nothing serious, and I’d had no luck in hooking-up with any locals. I’d even placed an advertisement in the New York Review of Books, the literary publication where people placed personal classified ads searching for soul mates: ‘SWF seeks 40-something SWM to share movies, wine, conversations and long walks in the park’—that kind of thing. I can’t remember what I said in my ad, but I’d been quite excited when an English professor from Boston responded. We agreed to meet outside a kiosk in the Village. I wore one of my new Bruno Magli high heels, which was a mistake. He barely came up to my waist and he was wearing a brown suit. My ad should have said: ‘SWF seeks SWM with some fashion sense.’ We could find nothing to talk about. My one-and-only date with an American man lasted less than an hour.
In April 1987 Rupert Murdoch established a fourth television network in the US. He had ignored the conventional wisdom that it could not be done, and on 6 April launched the Fox Network with a prime-time debut of Married—with Children, a program I described in my piece as ‘a smutty sitcom’.4 It was an instant hit. With its down-market program formula and its aggressively right-wing political agenda promulgated on its Fox News channel that was established a decade later in 1996, Fox grew to become an influential and profitable network, while in the second decade of the 21st century the legacy networks struggled to survive. Just a week before the Fox launch, Murdoch had spent $US300 million to acquire Harper & Row, the third-largest book publisher in the United States, a move which, I wrote, ‘further consolidates his worldwide dominance over newspaper, magazine and book publishing’.5 I had also had some fun in August 1986 with a little scoop about Murdoch gazumping Ronald Reagan by spending $7 million on a fourteen-room, two-storey Spanish style mansion in Bel Air once rented by Katharine Hepburn. President Reagan thought he had finalised the purchase of his dream retirement home with its spectacular views and its Hollywood history, I wrote, but that was before the media mogul came along and, doing what happens all the time in Sydney, made a better offer.6 I’d got the tip for this story from David Hay, who was now living in LA trying to break into screen-writing, and he had seen a small item in the Hollywood Reporter. I stayed with David in his apartment in West Hollywood and had been a witness to a tragedy unfolding right next door, where a friend of his was succumbing to AIDS. A stream of friends came and went, knowing there was nothing they could yet do to stop this calamitous and fatal plague that had assailed the gay community just a few years earlier. I had been visiting New York in 1981 when David told me about the meeting he’d attended, convened by a doctor in the East Village, of men worried about this as-yet unnamed new disease that was striking gay men. Now, just five years later, AIDS had become an epidemic that had already killed almost 49,000 gay men, haemophiliacs and intravenous drug users in the United States. There was widespread panic, but also political revulsion. The Reagan White House refused to acknowledge what was happening. As the medical profession struggled to understand the disease and its origins, the gay community became radicalised and militant. People were fighting for their lives. It would become one of the biggest stories of the 1980s.
I continued to file stories big and small, including the occasional gems, stories that just made you smile. In late October 1986 I filed a story about Malcolm Fraser losing his trousers in a motel in Memphis.7 Fraser had been visiting the southern city in his role as co-Chair of the Commonwealth’s Eminent Persons Group, a body established to negotiate an end to apartheid, and had failed to turn up for a businessmen’s breakfast. The editor of the local newspaper had asked one of his reporters to investigate and soon the story emerged: Fraser had checked into a sleazy motel, paying cash and giving a false name, and had emerged hours later having been robbed of his passport, credit cards, cash—and his trousers. He had had to borrow some pants from the bellhop, a much shorter man than the former Prime Minister. Later, all kinds of embellishments emerged about who Fraser had been with but the initial story merely centred on the embarrassing outcome of his escapade. I felt a small surge of happiness when I filed the story, as I remembered what a bastard Fraser had been while in office. I was astonished by the way he became a hero of the left in his later years. He was idolised for his liberal stance on asylum-seekers, and cheered when he and his wife Tamie resigned from the Liberal Party. But my story glory was short-lived. I discovered the next morning that Paul Sheehan, sitting in the office next-door to me, also had the story. He and I did not get on, and certainly did not share with each other what we were writing about. Unlike me, Sheehan had been able to track down Fraser and get a quote, and the Sydney Morning Herald had given his story major treatment, whereas my piece had been run as just a little right-hand column on the front page.
I had hoped my three-part series on Argentina would be my journalistic salvation. I’d done an enormous amount of preparatory research and during my week in Buenos Aires had had great access, including an interview with President Raúl Alfonsin. It was just three years since democracy had returned to this damaged country, after seven years of the so-called ‘dirty war’ of military rule. During that time as many as 30,000 people had ‘disappeared’. It had been chilling while I was there to see that the ubiquitous olive green Ford Falcons the military had used to abduct activists were still on the streets. It had been a hard subject to write about, and I felt my series had not done it justice. Fly-in fly-out journalism was not the way to understand a country, I realised, especially one that had endured the kind of trauma that had taken place in Argentina. What I had done was workmanlike, but it was not the kind of journalism I aspired to. It was not the penetrating or elegant writing that I aspired to. I started to doubt myself, to think that perhaps I didn’t have it in me. Or perhaps newspapers were not the place for that sort of writing. I was becoming attracted to American magazines and the license they seemed to give writers to explore important topics. Maybe I should be looking for another kind of job.
I’d visited Australia in May and gone to Canberra to catch up with people, and was astonished when Mike Codd, now head of Prime Minister and Cabinet, asked if I’d be interested in coming back to the bureaucracy. I thought I’d burnt that bridge but he told me I’d have no trouble getting a Deputy Secretary’s job. I’d also had a very strong overture from Hawke’s office that there could be a job there, if I wanted it. I could not see myself going back to Canberra, but it was nice to know that I was seen as having the ability to do such jobs. I’d made the leap back to journalism and that was where I was going to stay, but maybe not where I was at the moment. I met with Suich who asked me what I wanted to do.
‘Edit the Sydney Morning Herald,’ I said without hesitation. The National Times would have been the place for me to learn and I would have left New York in a heartbeat if that job had been offered to me.
It was too late, of course. Valerie Lawson had been made editor of the Times on Sunday, as it was now called, a month earlier. She asked me to be her deputy. I was insulted enough that I had not been considered for the top job, and I knew she’d shopped the deputy’s role to at least one other person, so I said a resounding No. I’d had a senior man in Fairfax beg me to take it. I’d be much better with staff, he said, and with ideas. But I was hurt and angry that yet again I had been passed over for the editor’s job. There had been six editors in the nine years since Evan Whitton had succeeded Suich in 1978. I’d looked on with disbelief and some bitterness as David Marr, Brian Toohey, Jeff Penberthy, Robert Haupt and, now, Valerie Lawson had each been given the job. Why not me? I was as qualified as any of them. I did not have editing experience, Suich said when I complained. Neither had any of the other appointees. I was assured that I was being tracked towards something big. If I could just put in the hard slog in a number three or four slot at the Herald for the next five to seven years, it would all fall into place. It was hardly enticing. I went back to New York restless and uncertain about what I was going to do with my life.
In mid-1987, Sandra Yates arrived in New York from Sydney with a brief to start a new magazine for teenage girls. Sandra had been deputy managing director of Sungravure, the magazine publishing group owned by Fairfax, and publisher of, among many titles, Dolly, the very successful magazine for teenage girls. She had proposed that Dolly could be migrated to the US where, she argued, the existing teenage titles were staid and boring. The market could do with a big shake-up. It was a brave idea but Fairfax bought it, and now Sandra was in town looking for premises, getting herself known in the magazine publishing world, lining-up an advertising agency, and recruiting the staff she needed to launch this venture. I was enlisted to help look for office space, so for a couple of months I found myself working closely with her. Sandra was a very down-to-earth person who spoke bluntly and did not waste time with ceremony. She knew what she wanted and she went after it with a focus and determination that I watched with both admiration and amazement. She was creating a totally new product that, after some research, she decided was going to be called Sassy. The launch was planned for March the following year. Sandra’s enthusiasm was infectious, and what she was doing looked far more exciting and interesting than where I found myself. I wished I could somehow be part of it. So on 4 August 1987, when Sandra took me to lunch at Café Un Deux Trois, a bistro located at 123 West 44th Street, just around the corner from the Fairfax office, and told me that Ms. magazine was for sale and she thought that we should get Fairfax to buy it, she would run it in a stable with Sassy, and that I should become its editor-in-chief, I did not hesitate.