“MICHAEL! GET THE F— IN HERE — NOW!” How could I refuse such a graceful and charming invitation? Not that I, or anyone else for that matter, refused Nene King. Not if they wanted to keep their job and career intact.
When Nene screamed those particular words at me, I was a young journalist working on Woman’s Day magazine, at the time the second biggest-selling magazine in the country.
It was a Monday morning and Nene had just received a phone call from a lawyer about a man I’d written a story about, a former rugby league referee who had finally given into his transgender feelings and had a sex-change operation.
The lawyer, who represented the man’s irate wife, who was now divorcing him, didn’t like what he read.
He threatened a legal injunction, something that might take the magazine off the newsstands. If that happened, it could cost my employer, the formidable Kerry Packer, millions.
“What the f— are you doing to me?” Nene screamed from behind her desk. Violently, she waved a copy of the magazine in my face.
“Look at this — he’s got a five-day growth and he’s wearing a f—ing Laura Ashley dress. For f—‘s sake, Michael, he’s a c–k in a frock!”
Nene’s face was purple. She looked like she might punch me. Then she dissolved in laughter. “Oh, what the f—!” she said, throwing up her hands. “Screw the lawyers. What the f— do they know? The readers’ll f—ing love it.”
This was the attitude that drove Nene King. It didn’t matter what anyone else thought, as long as her readers liked what she was doing. That was what counted. And it was this attitude — well-served by a finely tuned gut instinct for what was popular — that carried her from being a little known backroom Melbourne journo to being, at the height of her fame, the most powerful woman in Australian magazine publishing and one of the most recognised women in the country, rubbing shoulders with Australia’s richest and most powerful man, Kerry Packer.
Yet at the heart of Nene King’s story is a long and sometimes bitter rivalry with Australia’s other magazine maven, Dulcie Boling, the former editor of New Idea and Nene’s former boss.
These two publishing titans clashed horns on the nation’s newsstands as each vied for the loyalty and cash of millions of readers.
The ABC will tell their story tonight in the eagerly anticipated second part of the mini-series, Paper Giants: Magazine Wars, made by the same people who produced 2011’s successful mini-series, Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo.
It is a lavish production starring Mandy McElhinney, of “Kiss me, Ketut” fame, as a raucous, over-the-top Nene, and Rachel Griffiths as the cool, controlled Dulcie Boling.
Yet the woman at the heart of that story is Nene King, a woman whose ambition led her to the editorship of two of the country’s biggest magazines, a woman who earned millions as a highly paid executive, only to find herself, aged 70, living from one pay cheque to another as an agony aunt for New Idea, the title she tried so hard to destroy at the height of the magazine wars.
Life has not been easy for Nene since she retired from magazines in 1999. She has lived with grief, loneliness and drug addiction, afflictions that isolated her and cut her off from friends who might have helped.
Yet, even today, Nene is on her way back. She might be 70, but is now carving a satisfying life for herself. After a well-publicised rehabilitation program, she is back in control and allowing herself a well-deserved portion of self-respect.
The truth is that Nene King, the brilliant mass-market editor, was herself a mass of contradictions.
Brought up as the daughter of a wealthy clothing retailer, Lionel, and a former ballerina, Emily, Nene was educated at MLC, an exclusive Melbourne private school, and once studied law at Melbourne University.
Outwardly, she was strong, confident and articulate; a woman who did things her way and drank her tea from a Louis Vuitton cup.
Yet she was also vulnerable, wore her heart on her sleeve, swore like a drunken sailor, proudly bought her clothes at chain stores such as Katies and Target, and unabashedly sported a large red rose tattoo on her wrist.
At her best, Nene King, a self-proclaimed “Jewish princess”, was a warm, generous, motherly tabloid genius. At her worst, she was an erratic, abusive banshee, who terrorised errant staff until she either got what she wanted or got rid of them.
“Nene King wasn’t just another magazine editor,” recalls Bunty Avieson, a former editor-turned-author and academic, who worked alongside Nene at both Woman’s Day and New Idea.
“She was a force of nature. She didn’t just walk into a room, she erupted into it. She was like a volcano, always on the edge of an emotional explosion, whether it was with her ideas or her temper. But that emotion was what made her great.”
However, Nene at the pinnacle of her fame in the early ’90s was a far cry from the Nene who started at New Idea in 1979. It was there, where she rose to become deputy editor, that she discovered a fire in her belly and a rivalry with then editor Dulcie Boling that would drive Nene’s ambition for more than a decade.
“Nene was a lot quieter in those days,” recalls Bunty Avieson, who was a cadet at New Idea. “She was still developing. She wasn’t the full-blown Nene yet. She was absolutely smaller in every way under Dulcie. Dulcie was the boss. And there was only room for one star.
“It was hard for Nene to get too big for her boots. Nene was always trying to prove herself.”
And she loved the work. Nene thrived on stories about celebrities: their marriages, their break-ups, their babies — and so did the readers.
“Nene was in awe of Dulcie in those days,” says Lorrae Willox, who started at New Idea just a few months after Nene.
“You couldn’t have found two more different people. Nene was a big redhead with a loud voice who shopped at Target and went to the pub after work. Dulcie was cool and calm, always in control. She wore designer clothes, never a hair out of place. They were from different planets.”
Yet, somehow, they worked. Dulcie was a consummate businesswoman, always with an eye on budgets and profit margins.
Nene had a tabloid heart that was plugged into the western suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne. Their alliance brought readers in their droves, but it was never destined to last.
“In the beginning, Dulcie had the power,” says Prue MacSween, then a reporter for TV Week, who also worked at Southdown Press. “She was Nene’s boss. But in the mid-’80s, that changed.” Prue and everyone else could sense the tension between them.
“When Dulcie left the floor — her office was upstairs — Nene’s swearing and ranting was outrageous. She’d yell, ‘I’m not going to put up with this.’ But the minute Dulcie came back on the floor, Nene was a little lamb, a cowed individual. But she’d make faces and roll her eyes behind Dulcie’s back.
“Nene is one of those people who wants to be loved. I don’t think she believes in herself very much. She was always the one running behind saying, ‘Me, too. I’m good, too’.”
Eventually, Nene began asking herself whether Dulcie was giving her credit for what she was contributing to the magazine and its success. And rightly or wrongly, the answer she gave herself was no.
It came to a head over the editorship of TV Week. Nene wanted it. Dulcie, by then CEO of Southdown Press, turned her down, giving the job to someone else. As Nene tells it, Dulcie wanted to keep Nene at New Idea. As Dulcie saw it, Nene wasn’t ready and was too erratic to become an editor.
“That was it for Nene,” says Val Hopwood, one of her closest friends. “She thought then that she would never achieve her dreams, never run her own race, and that Dulcie would always be the boss.”
Nene, true to her volcanic reputation, erupted and walked out — straight into a job as deputy editor at New Idea’s major rival Woman’s Day.
She was going to prove that she had exactly what it takes to be an editor: she was going to be number one. And when Australian Consolidated Press bought Woman’s Day, she got her chance.
She became editor on January 18, 1988. That was the day the war began. “And she had so much to prove,” says Prue MacSween. “Nene is such a competitive animal. It was finally her time in the sun and she was going to bloody trounce Dulcie Boling.”
Nene knew she had to make an impact. “Woman’s Day was dull, a magazine written in sepia,” says Richard Walsh, a former publisher. “It needed a revolution and Nene King was a revolutionary.”
All her instincts, honed at New Idea during the past eight years, now came into play. She even slept with a fax machine beside her bed to scan the all-important Fleet Street clippings for stories about Diana, Princess of Wales. And Nene wanted as much of Diana as she could get.
Local exclusives were paramount. The faces and particularly the love lives of stars from A Country Practice, E Street and Neighbours were cannon fodder in an unrelenting campaign of attrition.
“Nene changed,” says Val Hopwood. “I knew really only the softer side of Nene, but when she started at Woman’s Day, the ruthless side took over. She wanted to get to the top and it didn’t matter who she bulldozed to get there.”
She drove herself and her staff with a relentless passion. She became, in a phrase she used herself, “the dragon lady of magazines”.
Yet there was a lot of generosity, too. “In many ways, she was a bully,” says a former staffer, “but she could be a benevolent bully. She would tear you to bits one day, then send you to Fiji the next, or tell you she was sending you to the Carribean. Putting up with her erratic temper was part of the job.”
Many staff faced with bills or misfortune found envelopes on their desks, some containing hundreds of dollars.
“That was the way she bound people to her,” says Bunty. “Those little kindnesses made you part of her family. It meant that when she was cross, it was especially eviscerating because you felt like you’d let her down. She was an emotional person and that emotion, high or low, drew you in.”
A steady diet of Diana, royal scandal, celebrity tittle tattle and wacky psychics appealed to a younger, previously untapped part of the magazine market that was ready for as much gossip as it could get — and Nene provided it.
The success allowed Nene the leverage to do just about whatever she wanted, backed by her own audacity and a seemingly unlimited chequebook.
Kerry Packer would come to see her in her office. “I’d come in early and I’d see a man’s feet up on her desk,” recalls former writer Angela Donaldson.
“At first, I used to think, who’d dare to put his feet on Nene’s desk, then I realised it had to be Kerry. He’d come down to chat. They were on good terms. She told us he used to say, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing, but keep doing it’.”
In August 1992, Nene finally toppled New Idea, passing the million sales mark for Woman’s Day and her rival at the same time. Yet the war was far from over.
Just weeks later, Nene landed the exclusive of her life, when a photo agency called her offering paparazzi photographs of wayward royal Fergie, the Duchess of York and the wife of Prince Andrew, that were sizzling.
New Idea was looking at them. Woman’s Day deputy editor Di Blackwell was despatched immediately.
“Nene called and she said that ‘if I didn’t get them, don’t bother coming back’. I was under orders to pay whatever it took,” recalls Di. Nene reportedly agreed to pay $140,000 for the pictures, an enormous sum at the time.
The pictures showed a semi-naked Fergie holidaying in France with her Texan “financial adviser”, Johnny Bryan. There was even a shot of him sucking her toe. It was tabloid heaven: sex, scandal and a royal personage thrown in. Woman’s Day sold around 1.4 million copies.
A few months later, Dulcie hit back with Camillagate, recordings of a telephone conversation between Prince Charles and his lover, Camilla Parker-Bowles, in which Charles professed his love to his mistress and revealed that his most ardent wish was to be her tampon. The issue, a world exclusive, sold close to 1.4 million.
In the end, though, Nene always thought she emerged the victor. For Dulcie, it was time to move on and further up the corporate chain. Dulcie stepped down as editor of New Idea, but remained as News Limited’s representative on the board of the Seven Network, a position that, at 76, she still holds.
Nene, too, became a member of the Nine Network board in 1993, the first woman ever to do so — but her future path was never as smooth as Dulcie’s.
In fact, Nene’s life fell apart on the death of her husband, Pat Bowring, a former journalist, whom she fell in love with in the mid-’70s. Pat disappeared while diving about eight kilometres off Bondi Beach in 1996. His body was never found.
“Pat was Nene’s rock,” says Val Hopwood. “There was no doubt about that. She loved him with all her heart and she loved being married to him. When he died, the bottom fell out of her world.”
Bunty Avieson says Nene was like a schoolgirl with Pat, a former alcoholic who’d given up drink for physical fitness and diving.
His disappearance cut the heart out of her. “It was like there was a big black cloud around her and she just collapsed,” says Bunty. “There was less of her. She was so reduced by what she had been through. I have never seen anyone experience grief like that.”
Nene took just two weeks off work. She was by then the editor-in-chief of Woman’s Day and The Australian Women’s Weekly. Yet something deep inside her had changed.
“When she didn’t have Pat, I don’t think there was anyone who could pour reality into her life anymore,” says Richard Walsh. “It was a tragedy. I think it left her emotionally unhinged for a time. And I’m not sure she ever fully recovered.”
Her emotions see-sawed wildly during the next few years. She tried throwing herself into work, but it wasn’t the same.
Then Diana, Princess of Wales, died, just as Woman’s Day was preparing a scoop with exclusive pictures of Di and her lover Dodi Fayed. Nene pulped the issue and replaced it with a special tribute.
Because the paparazzi were implicated in Diana’s death, the public turned against tabloid magazines. Woman’s Day was inundated with angry calls. Nene became the target of death threats.
Nene survived, of course, but it was different. Everything was different. “I was staying with her for the weekend,” recalls Val Hopwood. “One morning, we were looking at the newspapers, scanning for stories and she looked over at me and said, ‘You know, I don’t care anymore. I just don’t care.'”
Nene resigned soon after, selling up her Sydney home and moving to Noosa, Queensland, just as she and Pat had planned when he was alive.
Yet trouble dogged her. Nene was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. She fell under the influence of drugs and alcohol, admitting she used them to dull the pain and the loneliness. She sought care for addiction and tried to get herself back on track, only to become embroiled with people who allegedly swindled her of more than $250,000.
At a Melbourne court hearing in January this year, prosecutors alleged that two men who were living with Nene in Melbourne, gained unauthorised access to her credit cards and bank accounts, leaving the former magazine queen virtually living hand to mouth.
“When Nene left magazines, she left behind a lot of her friends, too,” says Val Hopwood. “She became very insular, cutting herself off and getting deeper and deeper into drugs, mostly to dull the emotional pain. Nene was lonely and vulnerable.”
At the time, Nene told the court, she was smoking up to 10 marijuana cigarettes a day and taking the anti-depressant medication, Prozac.
One of the men, Colin Hahne, has pleaded not guilty to all charges and is expected to face trial later this year.
“There is something of a Shakespearean tragedy in all this,” says Prue MacSween. “The girl who comes from nowhere to find fame and fortune, and then loses it all.”
Now, Nene lives in an impeccably kept cottage in Ballarat, Victoria. She lives with two dogs and a very fat cat, and makes a living as an agony aunt for New Idea.
“I was with her when Ita Buttrose came on the TV screen,” says Val, who visits every few weeks. “She glanced over and said, ‘There is Ita on the front pages as Australian of the Year. There I am on the front pages as a drug queen ripped off for $250,000. There is no justice.'”
Even so, Nene, who turned 70 last month, has her life back on track. “Nene keeps to herself, mostly. She’s lost weight and is starting to feel good about herself,” says Val.
“She still pops a pill every morning to keep the demons away. She was invited to speak to a local club the other day. She told them her story, about the magazines, about Pat and what happened to her afterwards. She was so honest. She had them eating out of her hand, just like the old Nene.
“She’s been through hell and she still misses Pat terribly, but she’s happy — happier than I’ve seen her in a long time.”
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