Articles from 2002
Too good to be true
The Courier Mail | November 23, 2002
It is just possible that the story you are reading here will not be to your liking. I am not sure I like it myself. I am not a fan of the national pastime of eating our own young, especially if they are pretty, clever and precocious; and this one, some would say, is a national treasure, a cover-girl who counts Kylie Minogue as a friend, whose records go platinum on release, and whose old jeans can pull $22,000 at a charity auction. That’s more than Kylie’s do.
So I want to make it plain I am not setting out here to eat Nikki Webster. I am not setting out to play the Wicked Witch to her Dorothy. What I want to explain is why, after 25 years in newspapers and thousands of interviews, I could be reduced to fist-thumping frustration by a quick chat with a 15-year-old girl.
It is that phrase, “15 year-old girl”, that is the nub of the problem. Looking back, I did not actually interview Nikki Webster, the 15-year-old girl, for 35 minutes at her West End apartment this week. I interviewed Nikki Webster, the phenomenon.
This second Nikki looks just like the first with her curly blonde hair and lively eyes. But she is a little like Austin Powers’ fembots in reverse: Snapped on to the real Nikki, she is a robot with an implanted chip, a niceness chip that holds predictable, pre-programmed phrases and sanitised attitudes. Like the fembots, she is too good to be true. But, like Austin Powers, we dearly want her to be.
I should have known all this from the beginning, even before I began the research, when acquaintances who had been singularly unimpressed that I’d met Bill Clinton, Muhammad Ali or Lauren Bacall became suddenly animated when they heart I was meeting Nikki.
It would not have been that way two years ago. Even after her astonishing entry into the national consciousness, via the Olympic opening ceremony, when her fresh, unspoilt image seemed a symbol of the nation, it would have been different. She was just a pretty 13-year-old then, with a clear, pure voice. Brave, too, to be soaring 45m above the stadium in a little pink sun-dress. But in September 2000, no one would have expected her to know a great deal, or even to be an interesting person.
It would be a mistake, however, to underestimate the powerful impact a home-town Olympics can have on the collective psyche. Nikki Webster, Hero Girl, held up a mirror to us: there we were, young, healthy, good-looking, brave and good, all the qualities we desire. Neither should we underestimate the impact of a new star’s PR people, agents and managers on that tender psyche. With our collaboration, they made Nikki the vehicle for those desires.
Implicit in all this, says Karen Brooks, senior lecturer in popular culture at the Sunshine Coast University, is the magic that has attached itself to a girl who, in every other sense, is quite ordinary.
“Life since the Sydney Olympics has been this dream for Nikki, it has been magic. She was an ordinary little girl, not particularly talented or particularly attractive, and she won the lottery,” Brooks says. “I say, good on her for what she’s achieved.”
A big part of Nikki’s attraction to her very young fans, according to Brooks, is the suggestion that, if it happened to Nikki, it could happen to anyone. “There’s really nothing remarkable there, and that’s good, too, it means you don’t have to be extremely beautiful to win,” she says. “It puts celebrity on a level playing field,”
But the Nikki vehicle has begun to move very fast. Following quickly upon Nikki’s Olympics came multiple public appearances and the release of her single, Strawberry Kisses (which went platinum), and her own CD, Follow Your Heart. She started her own website (I was visitor number 342,143), made television guest appearances and sang at every second public function around the country.
By her 14th birthday she had amassed an extraordinary following of pre-teen fans, fascinated by her verging-on-vamp outfits (she designs them herself), her favourite drink (water) and her favourite Chupa-Chup flavours (cherry and pineapple).
She appeared on the cover of Barbie magazine and in Who Weekly’s “most intriguing” list, and their “industry power” list, coming in at No. 10 and whipping Cate Blanchett, Russell Crowe and Lisa McCune in the process.
She won awards, became the face of Jager cosmetics and a spokesperson for Spastic Centres of New South Wales (as well as youth ambassador for Kids Help Line) and an unlikely gay icon with several Nikki impersonators romping through last year’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in Sydney.
Not bad for a girl who first trod the boards at four and broke into television in a Twisties ad at six. (She’s since spruiked for Codral cold tablets, Campbell’s soup, Optus and Sultana Bran.)
Then, late last year, the icing on the patty-cake: She scored the leading role as Dorothy in the musical Wizard of Oz, a role young Judy Garland made her own in a movie few people would not have seen.
After seasons in Sydney and Melbourne, the show opened at the Lyric Theatre in Brisbane this week. I sit through part of a dress rehearsal and my note, taken in the dark, record how tender Nikki is with the dog playing Toto. Against the word “voice” I’ve marked a big tick, against “acting” a big question mark.
People who know her say she is not precious, or precocious, just a down-to-earth, nice girl. But it’s hard to get there, as the girl has been completely overtaken by the phenomenon, created by the phalanx of managers and minders who now have a stake in her stardom.
She is both shielded by them and controlled by them, so much so that even though she agrees to a photo shoot to accompany this interview, and is clearly prepared for it, word comes from those who pull the strings that it is to be cancelled. There’s not enough time to prepare, (read: control) say the managers, so she complies, telling us firmly, no photos.
We sit down – sans minders, surprisingly – for our allotted hour together. The show? “It’s great,” she says, “a fantastic musical to be involved with.” In the breaks she’s had time to launch her new album Bliss, which has already gone gold. She’s done lots of shopping centre appearances and the feedback is “great”. It’s “great” to meet your fans.
In the following minutes I learn her parents have always been supportive; that she feels she hasn’t changed, her friends are the same old friends and they don’t give her special treatment. She still has “girly” nights of gossip and movies. She still gets thousands of letters a week which she insists on answering with the help of her mum; she doesn’t mind being a recognised face because “everyone is so nice, everyone who comes up to me is supportive and down to earth.”
A day in her life is just getting up and getting ready and going to the theatre and coming home. Pretty basic, she says with a smile that flashes over the sentence and is gone. She nods her head in a gesture that says, that’s all. Just the outline. No colouring in.
By now I’ve realised that all the time-honoured interview techniques of digging deeper, of getting under the skin, of connecting, are failing. Every attempt at follow-up is getting the same sort of answer: pat, packaged, rehearsed and delivered with the same lightning smile. If this was an adult, you wouldn’t let this happen. You’d be using a sharper shovel. But this is a 15-year-old girl, a child, not yet at the age of consent. And we don’t eat our young.
Even as she is telling me her next best career choice is working with disabled children, how lucky she is to do charity work, that no, her parents have never urged her to become a bank clerk, and how nice her fellow performers are – Kylie, John Farnham, Olivia Newton-John, Kasey Chambers – I am sinking deeper into this morass of goodness. Please, Nikki, I want to say, I am not a munchkin.
But perhaps Nikki is. Karen Brooks is concerned that, because of the magic powder Nikki is dowsed in, and the image of ingénue she is locked into, she is in danger of becoming trapped on an endless Yellow Brick Road of her own making.
“She’s 15 now, but still locked in this saccharine sweet image. There doesn’t seem to be a dark side at all. But at that age she has a social responsibility to say things that relate to her age, to show a depth and a breadth of thinking. She should have an opinion,” she says.
It’s important, Brooks says, because those in her great legion of young fans actually want to be Nikki.
“But it’s as if she’s on this Yellow Brick Road in search of a heart, a brain and courage, but the theme of the Wizard is that these things are inside you, you have to unlock them yourself. I’m afraid she is going to be happy with the little fake pink heart pinned on her dress.”
“I would say to her, ‘Don’t keep wearing those ruby red slippers that everyone else has worn. Kick them off. It’s OK to be normal.’ If she want to maintain this level of celebrity, she is going to have to reveal something of herself.”
Brooks says adults relate very differently to the Nikki phenomenon. There’s concern that with the idolising of her clothes and make-up, she’s sexualising young girls way too early. And in research with her students, Brooks has turned up adverse and sometimes cruel comments about the young star’s looks and talent, reviews panning her songs, and even groups who use Nikki photos as a dart board.
“But even that is an attempt, I think, to pierce the outer layers, the spin, and let out the real girl underneath,” Brooks says.
So what is there to reveal? Back at West End it’s becoming rapidly clear I will not find out in this interview. Even a year of playing Dorothy – doing eight shows a week for months and school work in between – can’t crack the façade. It’s all good fun, she says, and she doesn’t get tired. Well, maybe a bit.
Thirty minutes into the hour, it’s me who’s tired. I close my notebook and prepare to leave. But there are two little surprised left, each as revealing as the other. What’s happening after Wizard finishes? I ask.
“That will be December 23rd,” Nikki says, and then for five miraculous seconds, the real Nikki shines through. “Then it’s Christmas!” she says with the smile of a child. It’s so natural, so ad-lib.
We’re at the door. In one movement, she pecks me on the cheek, a quick fembot kiss, chirps a bright “Bye!” and heads off. I walk away, unaccountably disturbed. We’ve been acquainted for half an hour. But we don’t know each other at all.
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