Trash and cash queen Nene King loved Kerry Packer. Twenty years ago, Australia’s richest man handed the reins of a women’s magazine filled with knitting and scone recipes to a lusty, busty Melbourne-born short Jewish woman with frizzy hair and a flair for headlines.

Her mission: to give the mag a miracle makeover of celebrities, gossip, clairvoyants and tragedy.

Run from Sydney, the circulation of Woman’s Day doubled as readers thrilled to Elton John’s gay lover telling all and society belle Primrose Dunlop being jilted by a prince who would subsequently deny sexual diffidence. The Duchess of York would be caught poolside by paparazzi with her Texan lover almost – but not quite – sucking her toes to set an Australian magazine record of 1.4 million copies.

The perennial cover favourite, naturally, was Princess Diana, who would be surreptitiously snapped working out her chest on a pec deck machine in a London gymnasium, with Lycra legs akimbo. Or was she, as Nene King maintains, posing?

Back at the rival magazine where she had made her name as deputy editor, King’s conservative old boss Dulcie Boling sniffed in 1992 that Woman’s Day “attracts a somewhat lower end of the market, more western suburbs”. Within a year, Boling’s Melbourne-based New Idea had joined the party by publishing the Charles-Camilla tapes, where the world learned that the future King of England wanted to be his mistress’s tampon.

But Woman’s Day had already overtaken New Idea’s circulation, thanks in part to the chequebook journalism Kerry Packer sanctioned in the more fiscally free media days of the 1990s. So Nene King “certainly was” in love with Kerry Packer, she says now, reclining on her “nanna” chair in her home of the past six years in the southern Melbourne suburb of Caulfield: “I just thought he was the bee’s knees.”

It was a platonic love borne of Packer’s recognition of King’s talent and ambition, which she felt Boling had suppressed for eight years. Packer didn’t actually read her magazines, however, which by September 1992 included the Australian Women’s Weekly as well as Woman’s Day. King would eventually become the first female board member of Packer’s Publishing and Broadcasting Limited.

“I didn’t know he was dyslexic,” says King. “I was shoving the new Woman’s Day under his nose one day, and [the late Weekly editor-in-chief] Dawn Swain kept kicking me, saying – ” King lowers her voice sotto voce, “‘He can’t read properly. Shut up!’”

King however could tell Packer off for playing polo. “He was such a big man. I used to say, ‘How do you think the horses feel with you on top of them?’”

When she retired from magazines almost a decade ago, in January 1999, one headline read: Exit Nene King, Trash and Cash Queen. “Beautiful!” she says now. “Couldn’t think of anything more wonderful. Of course I trashed the magazine. Well, when I say trash, I put in a lot more celebrities – and guess what? Circulation went from 500,000 to over a million. And you want me to apologise for that?

“Cash? Kerry Packer used to call me his cash cow. Do I look ashamed?”

Indeed, she remains proud: “I think I was the most successful editor ACP ever had. That’s why I was amused when I was excluded from the birthday celebrations.” On July 31 this year, Woman’s Day celebrated its 60th anniversary at The Hilton’s Glass brasserie in Sydney, and on September 23, 75 guests donned black tie for the Weekly’s 75th birthday celebrations at Fort Denison on Sydney Harbour. Erica Baxter, James Packer’s wife, attended the latter.

“All the old editors, the B-list [were invited]. It was the funniest thing: they were sitting there on TV, showing all the covers that sold well, their best sellers. Guess who did ’em? Moi! It was laughable.

“I thought: you poor old ducks, you must be so nervous of me still, or embarrassed because I have certainly been public in talking about my illnesses… What did everybody say? Where’s Nene? Or pretend she didn’t exist?

“What broke my heart and made me very sad was that James Packer allowed me to be excluded. He was my mentor, he was my friend. He sent me an email [about six months ago] over something that upset me and he wrote, ‘Nene, you’re my friend.’”

But given the late Kerry’s son was on the verge of cutting the Packer family ties with PBL following the sale of most of the company to private equity – which he did in October – had it been his responsibility to have invited her? “I have no idea. I know nothing about it except seeing my covers on TV.” She laughs. “What can I say? Maybe the invitation is still in the mail.”

Nene King is now 65. Her frizzy hair has been pulled straight and streaked blonde, the former magazine matriarch’s brown eyes somehow wider. She has had plastic surgery on occasion, but “I want you to know I haven’t done ten rounds with Jeff Fenech,” she laughs now. “I’ve just had Botox and I’m a bit bruised. I’ve tried to disguise it. You should see me without the makeup.”

Born in March 1943, she grew up in Melbourne’s bohemian St Kilda followed by the more sedate Brighton: “I was a fat little frizzy haired girl with bands on my teeth. Dad was very proud of me but Mum didn’t like women much, I think.” She had her share of men working in Melbourne, London and Hong Kong, particularly in her years as a TV and newspaper journalist; what she herself calls her “slutty period”, which includes the time of her first marriage.

It has already been written that the late Billy Snedden, when federal Liberal leader, had propositioned King with an offer of “your place or mine”, which was rebuffed. King reveals now that when she approached Don Chipp for a story on the state of his marriage in the 1970s, the late Democrats leader said: “You come with me to the Rushcutters Bay Travelodge and you will get the story.”

She never did check in. “The Travelodge. That’s claaaaassy!” she drawls with a laugh, pulling a face. For a young woman with no body confidence, the offers remarkably just kept piling up.

Nene knows the value of a good story. Even when it is hers. Extra columnist Peter FitzSimons wrote her biography at her request in 2002. King says FitzSimons is a “beautiful writer and a beautiful man, and I let him down badly”. She has yet to read the book. During its writing and publication, King was having one of her nervous breakdowns, which meant she could not participate in its publicity.

“I just couldn’t get out of the house,” she says. “I couldn’t get dressed.” We’ll likely hear much more direct from Nene’s mouth via the memoir she is writing, From Magazines to Madness, which she says will be published next year.

Today she carries herself with a little of the old joie de vivre, dishing on celebrities and movies and calling out to Larry, one of the two live-in friends she credits with keeping her alive: “Darling – do you love me lots? Make us another coffee.”

Today is a good day, however. Most days are a struggle. A bad day for Nene King is when she simply stays in bed, comforted by her two dogs and three cats, and the few friends who have not left her when she has lashed out in anger. Or she might go shopping and splash on Louis Vuitton, Prada and Fendi handbags and not even remove them from the shopping bags.

“I now stand back and think: you cow,” she says. “You monster. It was like I had two personalities. I would be chatting and then [lash out], and always to the people I loved. I have lost so many friends because of my unpredictability.”

She then admits: “I’ve done some pretty drastic things. I took a lot of Valium one night and ended up in hospital. I just couldn’t face the world any more. It wasn’t that I particularly wanted to kill myself; I just wanted to – feel good.

“Which I now do. I feel better.”

Housemate Larry recently found King a diagnosis via research on the internet: post-traumatic stress disorder, which she says fits the pattern of her problems. In 1996, she lost the two loves of her life, and went back to work far too early without dealing with her grief.

Her father, Lionel, who was always proud of her achievements, died in April of that year, followed in May by Pat Bowring, her third husband, who disappeared while diving on the Koputai, a 100-year-old paddle steamer wreck about eight kilometres off Bondi.

They had been partners for 21 years, marrying in 1993 around the time of King’s 50th birthday. Bowring, a rock journalist, was eight years younger. “Sydney’s sad for me, every time I fly over the water,” says his widow. “I wave at Pat and say, ‘Hello, darling, how are you?’ Too many memories.”

Bowring had always been more than happy to let his wife have the spotlight, and he had swapped journalism for an obsession with diving. Bowring was a big drinker and dope smoker however – he grew marijuana in the backyard shed of the Summer Hill house he shared with Nene.

His habits became worse in 1994 as a way of coping with a close friend’s diving death in controversial circumstances over suggestions the man had been experimenting with his diving gas mix; Bowring had pulled the friend’s body to the surface.

When Bowring disappeared in 1996, his diving suit was recovered largely intact with no remains inside – minus a chunk in the chest area, as though a shark had sucked the body out – which led to scuttlebutt over whether Bowring might have faked his own death or committed suicide.

His wife believes neither scenario, though 12 years on she has never questioned his diving team about what happened: “Of course I think about it. But it’s not unfinished business. He’s not standing here. I can’t touch him; I can’t see him. [Yet] it was just such a shock. One minute somebody’s here, the next minute you get a bag of clothes.”

Having led a charmed life into her early 50s, King began burying her growing problems in alcohol. Kerry Packer wanted to send her to the Betty Ford Clinic to dry out. When she crashed her car while drunk and doped up in 1997, James offered to attend Narcotics Anonymous with her. “I would say, ‘Oh, bugger the world, I just want to smoke joints and forget’,” she says.

It is only in the last 12 months she has regained some confidence and learned to like herself again, thanks partly to a good psychotherapist at the Melbourne Clinic, where she has been an in-patient, undergoing one-on-one counselling for manic depression and group therapy for substance abuse.

She no longer drags herself around the house in a nightie, smoking marijuana. “I’d just be lying to you if I said I’d never smoke a joint again,” she says. “I don’t know.” One good sign: King coped with the death in April this year of her elderly mother Emily, whom she had cared for in Noosa and later Melbourne, as well as a close girlfriend from lung cancer, without resorting to marijuana.

She hasn’t seen her one sibling, her older brother Peter, “Snowy”, for a while. Her voice catches: “I think I’m probably too unpredictable for my family, and an embarrassment. They’re a pretty solid, good Jewish family, and here I am spouting to the world: ‘Hello, I’m Nene King, and I’m a drug addict.’”

She speaks, she insists, because it helps others with psychiatric illnesses: “I want to point out that someone who was privileged and so successful, can just fall in a heap.”

There has been no-one romantic in the 12 years since Pat died. Does she wish there was? “I’m on Prozac,” she laughs. “It takes away the sex drive, for a start.” Which has been better than the side-effects of her time on lithium, perhaps, when she was out to lunch with friends one day, declared “I’m terribly sorry”, and fell into her plate.

“A lot of women think, ‘I’ve got to have a man.’ Forget it. I’d much rather be on my own than have a partner I didn’t really like”.

She dearly misses Emily, but when she looks back she remembers saying to her mother, who strongly disapproved of her marriages to Catholics rather than Jewish boys: “I don’t think you ever really loved me, did you?’” to which Emily replied: “‘Well, I was very fond of you.’”

And the future? “I never look to the future. I try to stay well. Keep the few friends I’ve got left. Look at my diary and think: tomorrow I do my group therapy in the morning, and then I see my psychiatrist. That’s as far as I’ll go.”

*

Nene King on Packer selling his media interests:. “He’s sensible. Magazines and free-to-air TV are not the future. I think he’s brilliant to do that. And Channel Nine’s fallen in a heap. He’s a smart businessman. If it’s not working, get rid of it.”

King on a return to magazines: “Never in my wildest dreams. I was in the right place at the right time, and there weren’t so many magazines. Most of the people running them today are copying each other and there are no surprises.

“I love to look at all the mags; I have favourites now. I do look at them and think: ‘I wouldn’t do that cover’… I’d certainly like to get my hands on Woman’s Day again. I just think its become very boring. It sort of just fades away. [The same for] New Idea.

“I love [ACP’s] NW, which of course is one of the reasons I left originally [King argued NW would – and it did – erode Woman’s Day’s sales]. I love the new Grazia, but I hear it may not last long. And Famous is coming along nicely. They’re magazines for today. You look at Woman’s Day and New Idea and you think; ‘Ooo, they’re a bit elderly now.’ I just don’t know what to say about the Australian Women’s Weekly. I wonder if there’s a place for it now. So many of the things I introduced have disappeared. I love celebrities, beautiful things and beautiful homes. It’s a bit worthy [now].”

King on simultaneously publishing the story of Bob Hawke's relationship with his biographer Blanche d'Alpuget - pictured in the magazine in their terry towelling robes - and an interview with the wife left behind, Hazel Hawke: "She [Hazel] was beautiful, but to be honest, I had to say:'Hazel, can't you say anything? It's a bit lightweight.' And I think she said: 'Marriage is like a garden. You mustn't let in the weeds.' Bob screamed and yelled down the phone. I just put the phone down ... they still take the cheques."

King on Diana, Princess of Wales: "She was bonkers. Beautiful - the public loved her. When she died, as you know, I got threats and all sorts of things, people blaming the paparazzi and everything. But goodness me, she cut herself, she - was too young and married someone that didn't love her. This adoration wherever she went was extraordinary, but, yeah, she wasn't balanced. I think it was Mike Munro who said on A Current Affair, 'Ms King, do you feel responsible for the death of Diana?' I said, 'No, do you?' I mean, please. Why did they have to go out [the night she died]? Dodi's father owned the Ritz, so they had privacy there. Why get into the car? You can say why, why, why? But anyhow. It's one of those things. She's gone and that was the end of an era."

King on Barack and Michelle Obama: "I wanted Hillary [as US president]. Until I went to America and I discovered the Clintons weren't that popular. I think [Obama] is wonderful. I just think he's got such a hard, hard job ahead of him. And please God that he stays alive. Because some lunatic will probably ...

"I follow the Democrats anyway, and I thought Hillary as President and [Obama] as Vice. Now she's secretary of state, which is interesting."

Will Michelle Obama be of interest to women's magazines? "Yes, yes. Not like a Jackie O, or a Princess Di. Germaine Greer the other day paid out on [Michelle Obama] because of her [red and black] dress she was wearing...she just says things at inappropriate times. For the first time, [Greer] annoyed me.

"She looked fine. Michelle Obama will be - no, she won't be of that much interest. Don't forget we're a racist country. Of course we are, you know that. I think we try our best but there's a lot of hatred...we are racist. My girlfriend said to me - mmm, a friend said to me, 'A black man in the White House!' I thought [she was joking], but no. And [the friend said] 'How dare they compare Michelle Obama to our beautiful Jackie O! Michelle's black!'"