As the war between former magazine mavens is about to fire up again with the launch of TV series Paper Giants: Magazine Wars, former New idea editor Dulcie Boling launches a pre-emptive strike in The Weekly, revealing for the first time how she orchestrated the resignation of her rival Nene King, setting the scene for the decade-long publishing skirmish that brought the world Fergie’s toe-sucking, squidgy and Camillagate.
Dulcie Boling, the former editor of New Idea, is not a woman to be intimidated. Far from it. She can hold her own with some of the fiercest competitors Australian business has ever known. She’s the woman who was game enough to stare down Kerry Packer, rub shoulders with Rupert Murdoch and risk the ire of the Palace by publishing the scandalous Camillagate tapes, the infamous recordings of a private conversation between Prince Charles and his then-mistress Camilla Parker Bowles.
Related: Magazine Wars – The real Nene King
She’s also the woman who stood at the helm of New Idea magazine, taking it from a dowdy, run-of-the-mill craft and knitting magazine in the mid-’70s to become a headline-making, news-breaking success in the ’80s and ’90s. She’s the woman who went scoop for scoop with her great rival — and former colleague — Nene King, the editor of Woman’s Day.
Dulcie is also a notoriously private woman. Only rarely does she speak to the media. Yet her profile is about to be writ large once more with this month’s ABC TV mini-series Paper Giants: Magazine Wars, which tells the tale of the bitter circulation war between Woman’s Day and New Idea during the ’80s and ’90s.
Dulcie was the queen bee at New Idea when Nene King joined the magazine as chief reporter in 1979. Dulcie had been the editor for about a year, but was already changing the magazine.
For the first few years, they worked well as a team, well enough for Dulcie to promote Nene first to news editor and then to deputy editor, responsible for commissioning stories and overseeing the staff who worked at a large publishing house in Walsh Street, not far from the heart of Melbourne.
By 1986, New Idea’s circulation was soaring, up from just 400,000 a few years before to nearly 800,000. Profits were sky high, too. Yet so was the tension between Dulcie, cool, controlled and imperious on one side, and Nene, emotional, tempestuous and volcanic on the other.
“I’d been dealing with Nene’s unstable nature almost from the time she arrived,” recalls Dulcie. “To give Nene her due, she was a very good news editor, always chasing down stories. That was why I hired her. But she was a poor writer.”
But when a job came up as editor of TV Week, Dulcie didn’t think Nene was ready. In the June issue of The Weekly Dulcie tells of how she forced Nene out after she was denied the job.
“I manipulated her into threatening to resign. I knew she would do it. I am not proud of myself for doing that, but I don’t regret it. The truth is, it gave her the out. She could say, ‘I told that b-tch where to go and how to get there.’ I think that after she had been with me for six years, Nene deserved that.”
Related: Magazine Wars – The real Nene King
Nene soon became the editor of Woman’s Day, New Idea’s major rival, and began a circulation war with her former boss. Between them, these two titans of the magazine world waged war in the pages of their publications.
Read more of this story in the June issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
