The Life You Choose and That Chose You Read online

  ‘We used to sit on the grass outside the science block and discuss everything, floating along on the tide of our young obsessions. “Is life a dream”, our philosophy lecturer asked and we'd set traps for each other, pinching each other mentally. We discussed Robert Lowell and Piaget and Margaret Mead and Descartes, who David would ritually swear at, holding him personally responsible for the split-off world we of the West inhabited.’

  As the interview progresses from his personal life to his professional life, Leser seems to grow more comfortable. He begins to talk faster, the silences become shorter and his responses longer. He tells me that in 1976 his father became the head of British Vogue and while his parents moved to London, Leser travelled the world to broaden his horizons. He trailed across Asia, found jewellery in Kathmandu, and sold it on the streets of Paris. He tried opium in a den in Kuala Lumpur and spent time in a kibbutz in Israel. He travelled through India and Sri Lanka, and finally ended up in Europe.

  By the time he graduated, Leser had had his fun and was ready to commence a career as a journalist, beginning as a cadet with the Daily Telegraph in 1979. ‘Everyone was waiting for him to fall on his face because it looked like he got in because of his dad,’ says journalist and UTS lecturer Dr Sue Joseph, whose partner was a fellow cadet at the time. ‘As far as I'm concerned he proved himself in the very early days. I do think he's one of the most gifted writers.’

  Over the following years, Leser spent a lot of time in the Middle East. As a Jew he was particularly interested in the Israel—Palestine conflict. It was this same passion that eventually landed him in profile writing. ‘When I spent all this time there I thought, what on earth am I going to write about that will equal the drama of the Middle East? I came back to Australia and I thought, well, I'll write about people.’

  Armed with what he describes as a ‘holier than thou’ attitude and a persistent ambition to prove himself, Leser set out to profile some of the most well-known and remarkable people of our time, including spiritual speaker Eckhart Tolle, the First Lady of France, Carla Bruni, musicians Peter Garrett, Jack Johnson and Neil Finn, actors Paul Hogan, Heath Ledger and Russell Crowe, and more recently the controversial founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange.

  His profiles have filled two anthologies, The Whites of Their Eyes and Dames and Divas, the latter a collection of interviews with 21 women, from Anna Murdoch to June Newton.

  All of Leser's profiles are meticulously researched. He interviews the subject's family, colleagues, friends and enemies. Sometimes interviews with the subjects themselves will last for five or six hours. He is always looking for something beneath the surface. ‘If they happen to be intimidating then you want to know when you're being lied to,’ he says. ‘You want to be able to call them on it. And if they're famous you'll want to be able to crack through the facade, the armour that they build up. And if they're shy you want to be able to draw them out. And if they're damaged you want to somehow…find what's hidden. There's an edge to it.’

  The profiler creates the angle, and as many of his stunned subjects later discover, Leser does not shy away from the negative. In his earlier years as a profile writer (especially at HQ and Good Weekend in the nineties), Leser produced some highly controversial pieces that have won him as much criticism as praise. His profile of the late Richard Carleton, which suggested the former 60 Minutes reporter had devastated the lives of others, was said to have shattered Carleton—apparently he never forgave Leser.

  Leser's profile of Pauline Hanson copped flak for what some readers perceived as an overly moralistic voice (such as this line: ‘What I see again are the cold, sharp features of bigotry and racism and I am reminded of how far we still have to go to expunge this from our midst’). Hanson's minder John Pasquarelli later wrote a book in which he described Leser's article in the Good Weekend as ‘a very bad weekend’.

  Other subjects Leser counts as his ‘enemies’ include John Howard (who was apparently ‘ropable’ about Leser's profile of him) and Gina Reinhart (who, along with Rose Porteous, he depicted as part of ‘[T]he most poisonous dispute I've ever been exposed to. Apart from the Middle East’).

  But of course if Leser has an archenemy it would have to be Alan Jones, who brought a law suit against him that lasted nine years. The case centred around the accuracy of Leser's 1999 article on Jones's involvement in 2UE's cash-for-comment scandal, but Leser has no doubt it was payback for his unflattering Walkley award-winning profile of Jones published the year before. In it Leser wrote: ‘Having [Jones] as an ally can be a huge advantage. Getting on his wrong side can be the mistake of a lifetime.’ Little did he know how prophetic those words would become.

  ‘He has never forgotten it,’ Leser says, the lines on his forehead deepening. ‘He wouldn't.’ They eventually settled out of court, with Leser paying Jones an undisclosed amount. ‘It was horrible. It was always there. I moved to Byron Bay and Alan Jones came with me.’

  Leser has no illusions when it comes to his profiles. He carries an uncanny sense of self-awareness and does not delude himself into believing that what he does is ethically flawless. In his profile of Carleton, Leser pointed out that when he telephoned former journalist Stuart Littlemore for comment, Littlemore called him a ‘prick who goes sneaking around in the dark looking for dirt to dump on people’.

  In his piece on Pauline Hanson, he said that he wanted to tell her—but didn't—that ‘ [i] t's a journalist's job, particularly in a profile of this sort, to try to win over and extract information from a subject; and that only in rare circumstances does the subject not see betrayal in the result’.

  Leser doesn't believe he pushes his own agendas in his profiles, though he concedes that he is not always objective. ‘It's disingenuous to say you [can] push aside your own views,’ he says. ‘So this idea that you have to just slough off your own views and just come at it neutral, I think is a misapprehension. I think spirited and fair, as opposed to objective.’

  While Leser acknowledges that his subjective views may manifest in the final product, he believes it's justifiable to a certain extent. ‘My irritation is the irritation of millions of people,’ he says. ‘I thought it was just my own bailiwick, my own personal thing that I was on. But I think I reflect the grievances of a lot of people. Like with Alan Jones…[I] have a view of him and I just thought, who the fuck does this person think he is? This guy wasn't elected to office. This guy is paid a million dollars a year to mug people. Who does he think he is? I didn't put that aside.

  ‘I know that people who are on the side of angels are going to like what I write, and I know that people who are not, are not going to like what I write. Now that sounds very arrogant, but that's what I believe. If you are a thug, if you are in the business of hurting people, you are not going to like what I write.’

  So how does Leser assess the integrity of his writing? ‘I think I'm fair. I would like to think…I hope I am never cruel.’

  Some of Leser's subjects may disagree with that assessment, but Leser's editors rush to his defence. Fenella Souter, who was his editor at both HQ and Good Weekend for eight years, admits he was a ‘challenge at times because he's a man with his own opinion’ and will ‘fight for things he believes in’, but disagrees with the suggestion that some of his articles were ‘brutal’ to his subjects.

  ‘He thinks very deeply about those things as any good writer does,’ she says. ‘He thinks about the impact on people. I wouldn't say he was brutal. I'd say he was fearless in his reporting, but I don't think he's savage. I think he's fair and he picks his targets—who can take it or who is a public figure that perhaps needs examination. I don't think he'd go and savage someone.’

  At the end of the day, Leser knows that his profiles won't make him popular with everyone. ‘Everybody cares if people don't like them,’ he admits. ‘But I don't care if particular subjects don't like me. I wear it as a badge of honour.’

  Nevertheless, there was a time in the late nineties when the stresses of being a ‘high
profile’ profile writer did get to Leser, culminating in his decisions to leave the Good Weekend for the Women's Weekly and Sydney for Byron Bay. ‘I had RSI, couldn't move my arms, couldn't sleep,’ Leser recalls. ‘I was just so wound up with all of these stories that we moved to get away.’

  Initially, Women's Weekly wanted Leser to continue where he left off on Good Weekend, but he said he didn't want to write those kinds of stories anymore. He admits he had a lot to prove in his earlier days while scrambling up the journalistic tree and struggling to live up to his successful father, but now his interests and priorities have changed.

  ‘I don't choose to write about people I don't particularly like now—[I'd] been doing [it for] too long. I kind of want to write about people who improve the world in my view or I'm just fascinated to meet.’

  And he has throughout the years.

  ‘Petrea King—she changed my life,’ he says when naming his most memorable interviews. ‘She's a woman who's counselled 100,000 Australians with life-threatening illnesses. She's extraordinary. It was extraordinary for me to meet the Dalai Lama.’

  Others include poet AD Hope, actress Susan Sarandon and journalist Oriana Fallaci (who had been Leser's heroine when he interviewed her). He thinks about it for a second and adds: ‘[social activist] Fran Peavey, [psychologist] Peter O'Connor—these are all the stories that I think I say in the introduction [to The Whites of Their Eyes]—that changed my thinking. They're all stories about how we might make our lives better. So I respond to them. Not Susan Sarandon—she was just an actress and she's got a great set of tits! Simple!’

  Leser has also made many friends through profiling, including King, O'Connor, TV personality Andrew Denton and writers John Marsden and Helen Garner. Needless to say, these people liked his profiles of them. ‘And Susan Sarandon,’ he adds. ‘Nah, just kidding.’

  But sometimes old habits, like Bruce Willis, die hard. He tells me about his latest profile on sex therapist Bettina Arndt, who came under fire for suggesting Prime Minister Julia Gillard and former Australian of the Year, Pat Rafter, were bad influences because they were in de facto relationships. ‘Before I went to see Bettina Arndt I was so irritated by her,’ he admits. ‘It shows in the story.’

  It certainly did. After our interview Leser directs me to Arndt's scathing review of the profile, in which she accuses Leser of being determined to present her ‘as a fire-eating, conservative old dragon lady’. She says the article was ‘full of deliberate inaccuracies’, and that it is ‘[a]ll pretty typical stuff from a writer renowned for pushing his own agendas’.

  Still, Leser remains unfazed by such criticisms.

  ‘I write because I want to understand,’ he says. ‘And it's the best way of understanding.’

  One of the biggest catalysts for the change in Leser's life has been his family, which he says is a ‘huge part’ of him.

  Leser smiles as he talks about his wife Merran Morrison, whom he once described as a ‘feminist’ in his profile on Germaine Greer. ‘[But] she's more than a feminist,’ he insists. ‘She's an urban designer, cultural planner, a pyrotechnic, a curator, and a great cook and a great mother.’

  Merran is a director of Artscape: the Nature of Sculpture, an art consultancy that specialises in curating and managing art exhibitions. She is also a co-founder of the artsCape Biennial, a popular outdoor event displaying environmental sculptures in Byron Bay.

  Leser met Merran at a party when they were fourteen years old but they lost contact for years until they bumped into each other at a vegetarian takeaway shop in Paddington (while Leser was going through his vegetarian phase). But he didn't see her again for another two years because she was living in Canada at the time. When she came back for a visit they bumped into each other at another party, and the rest is history.

  And of course, there are Leser's daughters, Jordan, twenty-one, and Hannah, sixteen.

  Hannah is still in high school in Byron Bay, while Jordan, who topped her school in the Higher School Certificate, is studying part-time at the University of Sydney. Jordan is a talented musician with a haunting voice, and Leser believes she is, compared to him (an amateur singer/songwriter who once applied to be the lead singer of Midnight Oil), ‘by far the better songwriter’. She also happens to possess the same brand of magnetic charm as her father, the kind that makes people very quickly feel comfortable.

  ‘I'm like a parody of a Jewish father, hopelessly devoted to both of them,’ he says of his girls. ‘Putty in their hands, really.’

  Since becoming a father, Leser has always placed his family first. While working for Good Weekend he attempted to profile Theo Skalkos, the ‘Rupert Murdoch of the ethnic press’. But Skalkos was also known as a man who allegedly beat his daughter, attempted to rape an employee and even tried to kill one of his competitors. Minutes into the interview, Leser put some of these allegations to Skalkos.

  According to Leser: ‘[Skalkos] reached across the desk, grabbed my tape recorder, pulled out the tape, snapped the tape in half, tossed it over towards the wall, threw the tape recorder down, smashed it, and he walked around. He's much bigger than me and he literally picked me up out of my seat, and frogmarched me to the elevator. My legs were actually kind of dangling…He pressed the elevator and he threw me in against the wall and he said, “Don't ever let me hear from you again”.’

  Jordan was six and Hannah was one at the time and Leser decided to drop the story because he didn't want his children growing up without a father. ‘It's the only story I've ever dropped out of fear,’ he says.

  David Leser has accomplished much in his 31-year (and counting) career as a journalist. He's written four books and won multiple awards for his writing, but he's also worked extremely hard to get to where he is today.

  He flew 31,000 kilometres just to get one hour with Susan Sarandon. He stripped down for his article on a nudist colony. Bungee-jumped with and arm-wrestled Xena, Warrior Princess (Lucy Lawless). And even got stoned with a bunch of hippies so he could write an article about them (which, according to Leser, made it difficult because, ‘I don't remember anything they said!’).

  Right now, he is writing a memoir of his experiences (in effect, profiling himself), as part of a doctoral program at the University of Technology, Sydney, studying under the supervision of Joseph, who knew him back in his Daily Telegraph days, when he still had a full head of black hair.

  Leser is also working as an executive producer and one of two interviewers (along with Toby Creswell, former editor of Rolling Stone magazine) on his first documentary, Paul Kelly: Stories of Me. Leser, who profiled Kelly back in 1991, considers him ‘not just the best songwriter Australia's ever produced, but probably one of the top five songwriters in the world’.

  According to director Ian Darling (who met Leser at a party where Leser performed a Paul Kelly song), Leser has adapted to the new medium extraordinarily well. Darling raves about Leser's interpersonal skills and his ability to create relationships with members of Kelly's family ‘in a genuine way’ before the interview, to make them feel comfortable.

  ‘He's a great conversationalist,’ Darling says of Leser. ‘He always shows an incredible interest in other people. He's always very interesting to talk to. One of the great things about being a profile writer is that you have to immerse yourself in the mind, heart and soul of the subject. David does that in a way that I have rarely seen.’

  What begins as a slightly wary interview with David Leser (from both sides) concludes as more of a casual chat. By the end of it, Leser is laughing and joking with his legs spread wide open, one foot on the coffee table. He offers me a cough lolly.

  It is probably the way many of Leser's subjects feel by the end of their interviews with him, except Leser knows that, by now, it's out of his hands. He knows that no matter how well he may have presented himself there is nothing to stop me from taking whatever angle I want on him. He knows I could be nice because he's been friendly, helpful and has essentially done me a favour by agreeing
to speak to me. He also knows that, if I want to, I could portray him as a self-righteous, agenda-driven journalist who betrays unsuspecting people.

  But Leser knows that any profile is merely another point of view, just another version of the subject through the eyes of the writer. As he said at the Walkley Media Conference in August 2010: ‘[U]ltimately, the truth about someone is unknowable and forever mysterious. You can't even know the truth about yourself. It changes every day.’

  Historical record

  in 1792 radio waves bounce off the Arctic ionosphere

  a well-read man proposes that his uncle was the recipient

  of a kidney

  the gnashing of teeth serves as an apprentice to a passing

  resemblance

  in the family's hands government surplus aircraft pick up

  the pieces of the trumpet's solo

  close to foundering a marriage lasts

  zealously avoided by backpacker's disorder

  —dyslexia called talkback radio—

  it's a long way from Manitoba to Mosman

  reluctant to admit to the ‘stain’ every man glimpses

  a truth before he finds it on the map

  two marriages end in divorce

  Inventing the modern package tour

  at 11 pm on a January night

  shut up

  since December

  with the sole extant manuscript

  the last surviving

  peasant admired by both

  sides as the result of this union

  in Mohawk College in which 36 people died

  deigned to set foot

  the windows were broken and hornets had nested

  in effect an extended gathering of swinging