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Lunch With Jennifer Byrne |
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It may sound a bit Scarlett O’Hara but consider this: that the senior woman in one of the nation’s citadels of consumer culture – for when you strip advertising of all its creative gloss it is, of course, just about encouraging us to buy stuff – owns neither a house nor a car; she is a logo-free zone. Yates insists she does believe in brands, referring to a particular type of kitchen appliance I’ve never heard of, but her idea of luxury is a beautiful harpsichord and season tickets to the opera. Oh, yes, and a family trip to Paris to celebrate her and Michael’s 20th wedding anniversary a couple of years ago.
“It is really only in the last few years that I can contemplate retirement with equanimity and know I’m not going to be on the bones of my arse,” she says. In fact, the memory of poverty was one of the reasons why, when she and Michael went to America in the late ’80s and only one of them could work, they decided it would be her. She says she couldn’t have pursued her career without him; nor could she have accepted being the dependant.
But it was OK for him? “Yes, because he could do it. I knew I couldn’t and it’s a wise person who knows her limitations. I just couldn’t, I’d just been so utterly fucked over – twice. And it’s something I feel very passionately about, particularly with the women I coach: you’ve got to take economic responsibility for yourself. I think the chances these days of a young woman marrying, having a child, leaving the workforce never to return, that old stereotype, is about one in 14. They’re not great odds. And the statistics say we’ll be widows for the last seven years of our lives. From those early failures, I really learnt I had to take responsibility for myself. If I failed myself, then I’d have no one else to blame.”
And she did fail, in a sense. Publicly and painfully. Her big break came in 1987 when, having climbed the ladder to become president of Fairfax Publications, she was sent to New York to launch the teen magazine Sassy. Within a year, young bumbler Warwick Fairfax sold off his company’s overseas assets, and Yates and partner Anne Summers tickled Wall Street for $20m to stage a management buyout – only the second led by women in US corporate history. You may know the story: Sassy was too saucy for the religious right, which led a ferocious consumer boycott that scuttled the business. Bereft, Yates spent a year at the piano, playing away the demons. It remains the greatest professional disappointment of her life.
This reads much more grimly than it sounds over lunch at the Bellevue Hotel, a traditional Labor Party hang-out in the inner-Sydney suburb of Paddington (an interesting choice, given Saatchi & Saatchi recently lost the ALP’s advertising account, having ripped it away from John Singleton two elections earlier). Yates is so determinedly cheerful, so funny, about her bad old days that it brings you up sharply when she responds to a remark about luck with, “Crap. The harder I worked, the luckier I got.”What is lucky, she agrees, is that she was born optimistic. “Mum will tell you that I always used to wake up smiling. She’d do the rounds poking four kids awake, and I was the only one who was ever pleased to see her. At the end of the day if there’s anything different about me, it is the willingness to have a go and not to mind if it doesn’t work out.” But Yates does mind, clearly she does. “Well, I mind, but it doesn’t stop me. You learn from it and don’t do it again. I mean, I think having an optimistic nature is a great gift because you don’t get paralysed by fear.”
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