By MICHELE HEWITSON
Here's a question for Lynne Franks, the legendary PR guru and inspiration for Bollinger-swigging Edina Monsoon of Absolutely Fabulous fame: "Were you a hippy?"
"Was I happy?" she mis-hears in one of those moments when Antipodean vowels hit the ear of an English speaker from another hemisphere.
"A happy? Oh, a hippy." She laughs at that and blithely owns up: "I am a hippy now. I wasn't a hippy then, I was a yuppie. There are hippies all over the place. Everyone's a hippy really."
"Then" was the Greed Is Good 80s, when Franks was at the centre of the London public relations world. Her company, Lynne Franks PR - which she launched as a 21-year-old from her kitchen table - was the "it" agency.
The brand names Swatch, Tommy Hilfiger, London Fashion Week and the Labour Party were on the agency list. If anybody could launch a product, it was Franks.
To stamp the Swatch name on the wrists of the trendsetters, she erected giant canvasses in Convent Garden, flew out graffiti artists from New York, rounded up street artists from Britain and got them making art for a 24-hour period - to live Swatch time.
Then there was the "huge house," with the housekeeper and the nannies, the big car with the chauffeur. And, of course, the walking into rooms with a cellphone saying, "I'm coming in now," a la Edina.
There was also the hanging out with Jennifer Saunders, the creator of Ab Fab, introducing her to the fashion world and finding herself, or at least a caricature of her lifestyle, all over mainstream television.
She's learned to be good-natured about it. Franks says she was initially "all sort of prickled and hurt" that Saunders, whom she counted as a friend, had written the character without asking her.
Still, she is the ultimate PR woman and says now that the Ab Fab connection "has kind of been a blessing in disguise - even if I have to do a chat show and grit my teeth while watching a piece of the programme."
"It always gets me laughing. It hasn't hurt me really, as long as people don't think I'm going to turn up with a bottle of Bolli falling all over the set."
She's too good at this game to pass up that sort of free publicity: her 1997 autobiography was titled Absolutely Now. It was the subtitle that raised the eyebrows, if not the conservative ire, of the British press: A Futurist's Journey to her Inner Truth.
She wrote about getting naked on a mountain and feeling "the primeval blood of my female ancestors ... running through my brains."
Which is partly the reason that asking Franks whether she was a hippy is not as incongruous a question as it may first appear.
Because Franks has discarded the trappings (at least most ) of the fast-lane PR lifestyle. She's ditched the huge house, lost the chauffeur and, in 1992, sold her company.
Along the way she also lost a husband, swapped London for the more spiritually tolerant Venice Beach outside Los Angeles and gained a social consciousness she says was always latent.
"I've always come from a place of giving back, of nurturing people who work for me, and we did a lot of work for humanitarian and environmental causes that we believed in as a company."
She's in New Zealand - she loves it, particularly Great Barrier Island where she spent a few days talking to "the strong pioneer women there" - to push not so much a book as an idea. She's gone from "being the PR to the product."
That product is Seed, which stands for Sustainable Enterprise and Empowerment Dynamics. It is subtitled The Feminine Way to Create Business.
The handbook is what she's touting on her travels, but Seed is intended to grow into a global network which will train women, through its website (www.seedfusion.com) and through networking, to become entrepreneurs like Franks.
Think global feminism; think the Coca-Cola of women's empowerment. If anyone can launch a product Franks can.
But here we are at a table in an Auckland hotel, drinking mineral water with slices of lemon, talking about how to empower women 30-odd years after the birth of the feminist movement. This is the 21st century. And we're still just talking? Franks thinks she can do a better job of selling the concept.
"Feminism,"she says "was never about burning bras and hating men and being angry. It was about women being taken seriously and being given the respect and entitlement they are due."
Someone stuffed up the sales pitch then.
Franks is unlikely to repeat any branding embarrassments. She has, in fact, avoided using the word "feminism" - and "New Age" despite the Seed Manifesto.
If you're going to have a revolution, you need a manifesto, Franks says, and this one includes suggestions such as lighting candles every day and surrounding yourself with fresh flowers.
You should also drink six to eight glasses of pure water every day and smile when picking up the phone.
Such things are not necessarily New Age, says Franks, who takes care to avoid a term she says has become synonymous with brown rice and sandals.
But reference to "The Great Creator" to whom we are advised to direct thanks for the "wonderful abundance in the world" has an incense-scented tinge.
Take what you want from the term, Franks says. "I talk about it in terms of gardening and energy, the universe, the divine ... Maybe it's nature itself if you don't think you're a spiritual person."
The tips, which include using Feng Shui to create your work space, are not necessarily feminine, says Franks. They are really about "life-changing things. [Though] I don't know that too many men would actually bother to put flowers in their office every day, they'd think it was sissy."
Why would women do it? "It makes it pretty and attractive and changes the sterile atmosphere."
She thinks men and women do business in different ways. "The natural way is far less power-driven, much more about connection and relationships."
The woman who can spot a trend long before it appears on any high street says the way of the future for women in business is for them to get out of the corporate world - and she says they are doing so in droves - and make their own way. It helps that technology allows women working on their own to network.
The whiz-woman of PR says she's not making any money from Seed. She's now part of a small agency in LA which helps generate the money needed to get Seed out into a market place.
Franks sees it as selling empowerment, not to little groups of intellectuals but to "the working-class woman with seven kids living on a council estate."
Jut how this will change her life is a little vague but one thing is certain.
If you had to market this happy hippy, one simple slogan springs to mind. Lynne Franks: She Cares.
From London PR princess to flower-powered woman's advocate
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