Primedia Broadcasting, in
THE MARK GEVISSER PROFILE
Comrade Capitalist
`IF we don’t get the bid here,” said Stan Katz to Rina Broomberg as they stood waiting, for hours, for the Independent Broadcasting Authority to decide who would get Radio Highveld, “we’ll take it to the supreme court.”
Broomberg and Katz, the gurus behind 702 Talk Radio, had an acrimonious split two years ago, and were now on opposite sides. Katz’s Primedia, together with Zerilda, a consortium of trade union and women’s investment groups, had done a Rupert Murdoch on the burgeoning local commercial radio industry, and had swooped in, as Africa on Air, with a bid of R320-million for the station – three times that of their nearest competitor, World Wide, for whom Broomberg was acting as a consultant.
World Wide, including Michael Markowitz and David Dison (former broadcast advisers to 702), had fought back, claiming that Africa on Air’s empowerment deal was a sham. Katz and his Empowerment Parners (there’s a whole new lexicon out there, folks) were enraged, accusing World Wide of playing dirty.
Earlier, at the KFM hearings in Cape Town (where Africa on Air used a similar outbidding strategy), Markowitz had almost come to blows with Willie Kirsch, scion of the Primedia empire (his uncle Natie and father Issie had founded 702 with Sol Kerzner in 1980).
It was turning out to be a veribel – what we Jews call a family feud – of biblical proportions. “You know, Stan,” said Broomberg, “I had to leave 702 to discover that it’s just another regional radio station. I love radio, but I love life more.”
“Radio is life,” Katz shot back; quick as a whip. Perception is reality. Katz has his FM music station, at last. Part of the deal is that even though Primedia has full control over the management of Highveld (a quid pro quo for having given Zerilda a soft loan of R250-million that only needs to be paid back, at 11% interest, in 10 years’ time), Zerilda has a consultancy contract that will effect a skills transfer from white to black.
Katz is adamant though – and Zerilda seems to concur – that Highveld will remain “white” in terms of format: that’s where the profits are. Commercial radio, he says over and over again, “is about delivering audiences to advertisers, which means giving them what they want”. Here’s the irony: precisely this hardline free-market attitude, which made Katz so unpopular before the privatisation of some stations of the South African Broadcasting Corporation, makes him so desirable to those black people who now want a share of the market.
Highveld is American-inflected schlock. Even with the prescribed 20% local content (against which Katz chafes), it will become shlockier. Schlock sells. Primedia’s shares will become more valuable; a new cartel of black entrepreneurs will become media moguls in a decade or so’s time, and mineworkers’ kids will get scholarships by the thousand.
I first met Katz in 1991, when the earnest Dutch sent a whole lot of earnest lefties off to rural Holland to workshop the democratisation of the airwaves. Katz, as the only commercial player, caught an invite too. He was The Other, the Fatcat foil, but he played the game. The deadpan self- deprecating humour he had branded on air won the comrades over. He was baptised “Comrade Capitalist”; the name stuck.
Now he and the comrades – through the investment arms of the National Union of Mineworkers and the South African Clothing and Textile Workers Union – are in business. The biggest privatisation deal in the South Africa’s history has been cut, and the unions are beneficiaries! Jay Naidoo, appointed as minister of post, telecommunications and broadcasting precisely to sell privatisation to his former comrades in the unions, must be crowing.
Insiders say that Katz and Primedia initially wanted to give their empowerment partners 10%. Eventually, Zerilda prevailed on them to settle on 60%. It wasn’t enough just to blow everyone else out of the water with a megabid, they also had to demonstrate that they were the only bid where black people were in the majority.
“It’s a deal made in heaven,” says Katz. “They have entitlement; we have the expertise.” Once more, Katz, marketing genius, reinvents himself. As a deejay, “in the depths of despair, in my deepest depression, I decided to take on the persona of Happiness Stan – Doctor of Love”. Radio is life; you can be who you want.
On air, he was Stan the Man, voice like testosterone over gravel, the laid-back rock-‘n-roll groover with the deadpan one- liners, the cultish smooth alternative to hyped-up Long John Berks. Off air he is Mr Shwank – with the nattiest suits, the fanciest cars and the narrowest-hipped babes in town. He’s the guy who flits across the screen in the Lost City ad, lighting a cigarette, obligatory babe at hand.
Spend a little time with Katz, though, and you realise he is neither of the above. Broomberg compares Berks and Katz on air: “John is an arch busker, while Stan is rehearsed to the last ad lib.”
The real Katz is neurotic, obsessive, uptight. “I’m a driven sort of person,” he says. “I don’t have hobbies. I don’t relax. I was driven to succeed. I was desperate to succeed in order to escape my roots. I had to succeed, publicly or financially. I had to have done something.”
This is the man who went off to California for a year in the 1970s and has had a twang ever since. He is, to use two of the names he uses for himself, both Prince of Darkness and Prince of Cool, an angst-ridden, lonely personality who has agglomerated so many layers of personae around him it’s impossible to tell whether even that angst- ridden, lonely personality is a layer, or whether it’s his core.
He was, he says, as we sit together at his poolside in Sandton, once a stand-up comic: “I had all the ingredients – I was Jewish, I was depressive, I was insecure, I took comedy very seriously, and I didn’t have a huge amount of self-esteem. So instead of letting that crush me, I turned it into a strength.”
He gives me a tape of his brilliant Morning Zoo show for 702, dated Friday June 5 1987. “Lord Thompson of Fleet Street was born today in 1894,” he says, while a jungle chirps and caws in the background (part of the rehearsed anarchy of Stan’s “theatre of the mind”), “His real name was Roy. He went from a small radio station in Ontario to controlling one of the world’s largest media empires, including The Times of London. So you can see there’s no limit to how far I can go in this business … [the animal sounds rise to a mocking caterwaul, the classic Stan self-deprecation] … if I could just borrow a couple of bucks ’till payday …”
By then, as he puts it, “Stan the Man” had become “Stan the Manager”. He had reformatted 702 from a flagging youth music show to a phenomenally successful adult talk show – as an attempt to win back an audience Radio 5 had snatched from them by going FM.
Without a political bone in his body, he had read the winds – 702, conceived in sin between the Kirsches and Lucas Mangope, became South Africa’s talkback harbinger of democracy; its open airwaves. The right thing at the right time, it made a killing. When Primedia became a listed company, Katz was made chief executive of its broadcasting arm.
Chris Gibbons, who pioneered 702’s news department, remembers when Katz was made general manager: “I had a clause written into my contract to protect me from him … I was convinced he was all bluster and no substance, and that if he ever came aboard 702, the ship would sink in a glorious blaze. I was wrong, of course. He turned out to be a radio marketing genius.”
In the process, though, not a few lives were wrecked. Katz was a temperamental bully, who played on peoples’ vulnerabilities. Katz sees himself as a rugged individualist; he idolises Murdoch. There’s something brazenly sink-or-swim about 702’s corporate culture – no room for touchy-feely stuff like unions around here (which has caused quite a few 702 staffers to raise an eyebrow at Primedia’s new corporate alliance).
“The word mercurial,” says new 702 boss Mike Wills, who was programme manager under Katz, “was made for Stan. He is lively and volatile – not a consistent beast. He has deep downs and high ups. You have to adjust to his moods – if you can’t, it can be very debilitating. He is all vision and no process – it drove me crazy.” But Wills, like Gibbons, thinks it pays off in the end: “You can buy process; you can’t buy vision.”
Katz got his model for success, he says, by being of the baby-boomer rock-‘n-roll generation; the generation which showed that “four Liverpool scouses” could become kings of the world. He was, in his native Mafikeng, a rebel through and through, smoking joints on the wrong side of town with the bad boys.
But ask him if he related his rebellion to the broader system of oppression and struggle for liberation that was happening around him, and he’ll tell you: “Sure I got arrested for marching at Wits one time, but really, the feeling then was that the system will collapse under its own weight, and the best thing we can do is get high in the meantime.”
In the Sixties, Katz got high in the meantime. In the Seventies, he got famous. In the Eighties, he got rich. He made himself into Mr Radio with nothing but a weak AM signal he turned into a goldmine. That’s all about to change. But the very moment – the end of apartheid – that allows him to expand through deregulation of the airwaves also decrees him, White Fortysomething Man, a dying breed. And so, in the Nineties, Katz got wise, and hooked up with the smartest empowerment partners in town.
Broomberg, in an unpublished memoir about her time at 702, asks, “What is Stan Katz really like? I don’t think he even knows. Being the skilled marketing man that he is, Stan knows about image and has certainly worked conscientiously on his own outward appearance and public personae. I cannot help wondering how much of the real Stan, the one I glimpsed from time to time, has been compromised for the sake of status … [This Stan is] an imprisoned soul in search of his true identity which has been obscured in a world that masters the art of hype and even worse, believes it.”
Katz punctuates our few hours together with a foot-long Monte Cristo cigar. It’s a great prop, used with considerable humour. But at the same time it empowers him – the size of the thing! – I can see it makes him feel shit. He has given up smoking: you can almost see the nicfits crawling all over him. He is dark: he likes the blues and Bukowski; his deejay persona is prickly rather than effervescent. Perhaps it’s precisely because he has mastered the art of hype so very effectively. He’s been there, he knows how it works, but he can’t quite give it up. Radio is life.