The Social Diary Page 4

  Timothy Shaw, who was also given to wearing Panama hats to shield his florid complexion, was not the usual macho type of tabloid newspaper man. He was as interested in society as politics, and was particularly fascinated by the intersection of old Sydney money with the brash new entrepreneurs, who had seemingly emerged from nowhere with great wads of cash and reckless spending habits. He could never get enough stories about the attractive property developer Alex Evans, with his thatch of blond-streaked hair and perpetually tanned skin, who had bought tracts of land in Perth and Brisbane and was busy transforming them into holiday villas and glittering resorts which would rival Miami’s famed Fontainebleau. He called them H’evan 1 and H’evan 2. Evans’s wife, Jacqueline, helped out with the public relations and some of the interior styling. Her design aesthetic could best be described as Tuscan OTT. There were soon stories flying around the Eastern Suburbs that the Evanses’ corporate jet was being pressed into service to fly slabs of marble from Italy to Perth, with a stopover on the way to pick up the golden crystal chandeliers which Jacqueline had had crafted for her in Istanbul.

  ‘I want you to become part of the Evanses’ circle,’ Shaw instructed me when he announced that he was giving me the job of writing the paper’s Social Diary. He had looked at me so gravely across his huge desk that it felt as if he were entrusting me with national security or something equally momentous.

  ‘Of course,’ I agreed, not at all sure how I would go about this. Australia’s wave of eighties entrepreneurs had certainly not registered for me in London, where the only circles I was interested in gaining access to were the ones populated by famous reggae musicians. And during those late night shifts in the news room it had been all about petty criminals.

  Shaw had kept looking at me sternly, as if he was waiting for me to buckle under the pressure and confess my ignorance of the Evanses. ‘How do you propose to do that?’ he asked when it was clear I wasn’t going to crack. ‘Do you have a plan?’

  ‘Of course, Mr Shaw,’ I lied. What was this? I felt like I was back at school being interrogated by the principal.

  He looked at me expectantly.

  Oh, shit. Now I was going to have to come up with something.

  ‘Well,’ I said, inventing wildly, ‘Sydney is not that big a place. I’m sure I’ll know someone who already mixes in those circles. It’s just a matter of going through all my contacts, Mr Shaw. Maybe I will be able to find a disgruntled ex-employee who will be happy to fill me in on their habits.’

  ‘That’s the way, Savannah,’ he said. ‘Something tells me that you’re going to work out just fine. And from now on, you can just call me Tim.’

  The next day I had found myself sitting at a desk at the back of the news room. Placed in front of me was an official Sydney News diary, a notepad and a couple of biros. There was also an ancient typewriter and a stack of copy paper. But these were only to be used if the brand-new computer system, which had just been installed, broke down.

  The first person to visit me in my little headquarters was Tim’s assistant Janet, a small, birdlike woman with fluffy, blonde hair whose job it was to introduce me around the office at the direction of her boss. Unfortunately, no one seemed to be that interested in meeting me—especially not the other female journalists.

  One or two of them said hi to me and then continued on with their work, but the majority didn’t even raise their heads, just nodded vaguely in my direction. I wasn’t crushed by their obvious lack of interest—people tried much harder to be cooler in the English music press. But I overheard myself being discussed in a couple of conversations after I had passed by another group of reporters.

  ‘Who is that?’ I heard one say.

  ‘Some upstart who thinks that her shit doesn’t smell because she worked on some seedy English music paper,’ came the immediate reply. ‘But don’t worry—she won’t last long around here when she has to deal with real newspaper deadlines.’

  And that was really all I needed to spur me on to do well at the paper. I spun around and gave them a great big smile, which made them go quiet.

  Suddenly, a striking woman in a beautifully cut black and white suit, which complemented her glossy dark bob, appeared beside my desk and unceremoniously dumped a folder onto it. ‘This is for you,’ she said without bothering to introduce herself. ‘It contains invitations to all the social events you’re meant to cover.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said to her back as she strode away from my desk without saying anything further. ‘I’m Savannah Stephens by the way.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she said over her shoulder, rolling her eyes as if to indicate that she had been forewarned about me. ‘And I’m Erica Hopewell, the fashion director.’

  I had already recognised her from a bus-side advertisement for the paper, which promoted her as the city’s most authoritative fashion authority. She was pictured in an even more severe suit with her arms crossed in front of her like a true style warrior.

  They were folded again now defensively as she turned to face me.

  ‘You should know that there are a few rules around here,’ she said sternly. ‘I don’t take kindly to being interrupted in my office by civilians. If you have any questions, pester Janet. That’s what she’s there for.’

  Civilians! What? I wanted to burst out laughing because humour was the only way to deal with that kind of rudeness. Who did Erica think she was—Karl Lagerfeld? And why on earth did she already seem to have it in for me?

  ‘Oh, and one more thing, there is no need for you to be writing anything about frocks in your column.’

  It seemed that she was simply guarding her territory. I would soon discover that Erica was one of the most powerful people in the Australian fashion industry. She published several pages of the latest designs each week and this had the effect of moving stock from the shelves straight away. Making it into one of her fashion spreads was every young designer’s dream, but unfortunately Erica wasn’t much interested in becoming a style evangelist. She believed in giving back to her cronies. They were the ones who sent her expensive gifts and impressive bouquets of flowers following a mention in her pages. They also shamelessly wined and dined her at the best restaurants in town. The fashion director had her own unofficial banquette at The Duchess in the city and always ate at the top dining room at Pasquale’s in Paddington—the one where all the diners were on display, not only to others in the restaurant but also to passers-by in the street.

  As first days on the job go, my introduction to The Social Diary was ordinary to say the least. As I sorted through the large pile of invitations in the folder, I found that some were out of date and most were addressed to Fiona Wagstaff, who’d had the job before me but had mysteriously left the office one Tuesday lunchtime never to return. Nobody knew exactly what had happened—or, if they did, were unwilling to discuss it. There was some talk that she had fled to a sanatorium in Tahiti. However, the term most often used to describe her abrupt departure from the news room was ‘nervous breakdown’. At the time, I couldn’t for the life of me work out how anyone could have a nervous breakdown writing the social pages. Oh, how wrong I was about that.

  Three

  Queen Bea was probably busy giving some poor Parisian hotel concierge hell when a set of documents arrived at the newspaper from one of Sydney’s top law practices threatening a defamation suit against both myself and The Sydney News. I had allegedly held her up to social ridicule and besmirched her good name and also that of her hard-working, selfless charity committee. (The way that I looked at it was that she had done a pretty good job of that herself; if she hadn’t acted like a nutty diva there would have been nothing salacious to report.) At any rate Queen Bea’s dinner party had been weeks ago and the guests’ hangovers were just a foggy memory now.

  The first I knew that the paper had been hit with a potentially costly lawsuit over something I had written was when Janet marched up to my desk, a grim expression on her pert face. It had the desired effect among some of the o
ther female journalists nearby, who froze in the middle of what they had been doing, their spiky hairdos positively quivering with excitement. Was the blow-in about to get her comeuppance? It wasn’t that they particularly wished me ill but in such a competitive arena as a news room, it was every girl for herself. (I would later discover that Janet’s dramatic missions across the news room were the highlights of her day. This was a woman who didn’t believe in just picking up the phone to summon a journalist to the boss’s office—she needed to show who was really in charge.)

  ‘Mr Shaw would like to see you in his office now,’ she informed me crisply, as I sat at my desk sifting through the latest bunch of invites in a bid to find events where I could circulate and find stories. Unfortunately, the ones that today’s mail drop had yielded looked as dull as the paper they were printed on. The only possibility was a cocktail party to celebrate the arrival of a Gucci collection, which was being held at The Duchess. I had just logged the invite into the social diary.

  ‘Follow me,’ Janet commanded. She was the first one to have seen the legal correspondence which had arrived in the internal mail and it certainly appeared as if I was in deep shit. This had all the markings of a very dramatic morning and Janet was wearing just the outfit to do it justice—a crisp white, frilly shirt with the collar turned up to shield a big fat row of fake pearls, and a tight, grey-flecked skirt with a flirty frill at the hem. I could tell she saw herself as a woman not to be messed with. For that extra air of authority, she had coated her lips in a thick layer of candy-pink lipstick. She was ready for battle.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, standing up and grabbing a notepad from my desk. Janet’s manner had awakened a deep sense of foreboding in me, but I figured a notepad would signal the possibility of some sort of ongoing journalistic activity and give the person holding it (me) some purpose. Timothy wouldn’t sack a woman with a notepad, would he?

  As I clambered to my feet to follow the officious, sparrow-like woman through the news room, I felt quite ungainly. I was at least twice her size and height, so our procession through the maze of desks must have looked faintly ridiculous. Now some of the male reporters looked up as they also detected a frisson of impending disaster. A few of them seemed intrigued, completely forgetting their usual demeanour of feigned indifference.

  ‘What’s doing, Stephens?’ called out Eric, a jocular bloke who covered sport and was the office wise guy. ‘Don’t tell me that you’ve been carpeted already.’

  I grinned at him and shook my head—best to brazen it out. News rooms are one of the most gossip-plagued places on earth. Within minutes there was a buzz that I was about to get the chop for several different rumoured transgressions.

  ‘What goes up must come down,’ said Susan in her best finance reporter’s voice as I passed by. She was no doubt feeling extra tough today with her new cropped haircut and fierce designer suit with the power shoulders. Susan had never been a welcoming presence to me on the paper and it didn’t help that her yarn on a takeover bid for a department store chain had been downgraded to a page-three lead to make way for my Queen Bea story. On top of this, she had been made to struggle through a one-year cadetship after excelling at university, but I had sailed in as a graded journalist thanks to my portfolio of printed stories in the British music press and those leads from police rounds. No wonder she resented me.

  ‘That’s what happens when you don’t have a proper journalism degree,’ she informed one of her pals, who seemed slightly embarrassed that she was making such a fuss. ‘There is no comparison between being a rock journalist and writing for a serious newspaper like this one,’ she continued. ‘It’s hardly surprising she’s slipped up already.’

  Slipped up? I wanted to stop right there in the middle of the news room to defend myself, starting with the fact that I had a degree. (Well, almost; I had dropped out of an arts degree in the second year to go travelling, but at least I had been close—in the vicinity of an arts degree.)

  Timothy Shaw saw me approaching through the glass walls of his office and bounded out to meet me himself—much to the disappointment of some of my aforementioned colleagues. Judging from his body language, it didn’t look as though I would be packing up my desk today.

  ‘Savannah! Come in,’ he said, thrusting out his hand awkwardly to shake mine and to usher me inside. ‘Nothing to worry about, so get that look off your face. You’re doing a great job.’

  Really? I briefly turned and sought out Susan in particular, but she had picked up the phone and was now talking urgently to someone on the other end of the line. Maybe she was cancelling my farewell mud cake?

  Janet was lingering by the doorway; she too seemed a bit miffed that the scene was not turning out to be suitably cataclysmic.

  Noticing that his assistant was still there, Tim motioned for her to leave with a nod of his head.

  ‘Just wondering if you would like anything else, Mr Shaw?’ she said, sounding a little bit put out to have been dismissed.

  ‘No, thank you, Janet,’ her boss said kindly. ‘Just shut the door behind you, please. That is—’ he turned to me ‘—unless you would like a cup of tea or coffee, Savannah?’

  As much as I would have enjoyed watching Janet fetching a drink for me, I decided it wouldn’t do to get her any more riled up. ‘No, I’m fine, thanks,’ I said sweetly. ‘Just finished one, actually.’

  With a slightly mutinous expression, Janet marched out of the door and shut it smartly behind her.

  Tim and I surveyed each other from across his desk and I noticed he looked slightly rumpled—his soft blue shirt was in need of a proper iron and his tie was undone and hung loosely around his collar.

  ‘Now there is nothing to worry about, Savannah. We just need to straighten something out.’

  ‘We do?’

  ‘Yes.’ He smiled at me reassuringly as he picked up the phone, which was swiftly answered at the other end.

  ‘Rog? Yes, she’s here now. You’re free to join us,’ he said warmly.

  Who the hell was Rog?

  Whoever he was, Tim decided not to wait for him to arrive before filling me in. ‘Savannah, as I mentioned, you’re doing a terrific job so far and I’m pleased that you’re already making waves. And, on that note, there’s a rather big one coming our way because Beatrice Bonney is now threatening to sue the paper over that article you wrote.’

  I felt my body stiffen as I regarded him with horror.

  ‘No, no, no, you mustn’t worry. It’s nothing—this sort of thing happens all the time,’ he said, reaching over the desk to pat my hands clumsily. ‘I’ve just invited our in-house counsel, Roger Coutts, to join us so that we can work out how to respond. But, really, it shows you’re doing your job well. The last thing any of us wanted here was to have a fawning social columnist on The Sydney News—one who lets those silvertails get the better of them. The old Sydney guard is losing its influence on the media in this town. We want to be setting the agenda and not dancing attendance on some useless socialite.’

  It was quite a speech—I guess I hadn’t realised before just how passionate Tim was about all sections of his paper, particularly my own.

  ‘Besides,’ he added, fingering the corners of his tie as if to reassure himself that it was still in place, ‘all of your copy is checked by the legal department before we go to press. You were aware of that, weren’t you?’

  I nodded. I had actually been disappointed when I read my stories in the paper to note that so many colourful phrases had been watered down. But did this mean that if The Sydney News was sued, I was not liable? Before I could ask, the door opened again and a well-proportioned man in an immaculate suit bustled in. He appeared to be quite agitated. Meanwhile, through the glass wall of Tim’s office, I could see the eager faces of the reporting staff watching Roger’s entrance; perhaps I might be in the shit after all.

  ‘Ah, Roger, here you are.’ Tim rose to welcome him. ‘Let me introduce you to Savannah Stephens, our new star writer.’ He winked at me.
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  Roger Coutts looked like the media lawyer from Central Casting. He was wearing a suit with wide, chalky stripes just jaunty enough to denote that he was engaged in the journalistic world and not with a more staid commercial role. He also sported a red Hermès tie and a blinding white shirt. No wonder he cut such a figure in the news room where many of the male reporters worked with their sleeves rolled up and baggy trousers, which looked as though they had been purchased from a Lowes’ sale rack. I disliked him even before he bared his perfect white teeth at me in a disturbing impression of a smile. It seemed that the feeling was mutual because after offering me a limp handshake he wheeled his chair as far away from me as possible. The body language was off the scale.

  While my editor had been trying to play down the whole thing for fear of alarming me, Roger acted as if this was the biggest defamation case since the paper’s food critic, Michael Shelby, had speculated about the possible senility of a giant Queensland mud crab. ‘Jonah the Crab’ had been scooped from the tank of the Golden Rickshaw—a local Chinese restaurant—and dished up to him but the flesh was so tough and tasteless that he almost needed a bucketload of sauce just to get through it. The Golden Rickshaw had gone broke shortly after the review was published when even their regular diners had turned away. Shelby’s night out ended up being the most expensive Chinese meal in Australian dining history, thanks to the eye-watering defamation payment.

  Roger was now trying to convey to me that my story was up there with Jonah the Crab when it came to possible damages. ‘There is the imputation that Beatrice Bonney was off her face,’ he noted, staring at me coldly.

  ‘She was three sheets to the wind,’ I replied solemnly. ‘I could smell it on her breath, and so could the other guests.’

  Tim laughed, but Roger’s expression became even more steely. ‘And as an industrial chemist, you could tell from the fumes wafting from her mouth that she was intoxicated?’