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80 | denis beckett<br />
I found a name, Willem Malherbe. I crossed fingers, phoned<br />
Stellenbosch, and asked for Mr Malherbe.<br />
I did not know that this procedure, in the eyes of informed<br />
persons in media finance, was tantamount to phoning heaven<br />
and asking for God. Malherbe controlled the nation’s biggest<br />
marketing budget. You thought of him in hushed tones. If I’d<br />
known I might have frozen wholly. as it was I bumbled and<br />
babbled my readership targets and projected profile over the<br />
phone.<br />
Malherbe focused on one question: did I firmly believe my<br />
objectives were in the better interests of South africa? I said<br />
Oh yes, absolutely, no doubt about that, though his political<br />
advisers may not agree… He cut me off: “I didn’t ask you what<br />
other people think. I asked what you believe.”<br />
friday morning, my back page belonged to chesterfield<br />
cigarettes. chesterfield stayed for five years. When it left, it was to<br />
make way for rembrandt’s major brands – Peter Stuyvesant and<br />
rothman’s, alternating. That was promotion, people told me.<br />
rembrandt in my eyes were paragons. They never missed,<br />
despite my increasingly terrible deadline-keeping, bad salesmanship<br />
and monkeying with schedules (usually by abolishing<br />
months but once by adding an extra).<br />
Back in the circles of Johannesburg orthodoxy, Frontline<br />
remained suspect, contentious, risky. I do not imply that politics<br />
alone kept my finances from flowering. I screwed up more than<br />
the carpenters on Noah’s ark. Then again, I might have screwed<br />
up less were I not carrying this anvil.<br />
for the first few editions Tony Sutton and I sneaked to<br />
Drum’s offices at nights and weekends and brought pages to<br />
camera-ready form. In my mind Drum had done me down on<br />
the education job and I was taking my due in kind.<br />
at Drum, Tony was not your classic “editorial director”,<br />
standing on guard in case the Natives get restless. He was a<br />
design junkie, obsessed with getting right words in right place<br />
with right pictures and right headlines.<br />
He got into Frontline out of that and friendship, and took
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