Audrey Epstein
Audrey Epstein | |
|---|---|
 Audrey Epstein photographed by Vivian Meyer, 1959 | |
| Born | 25 September 1923 Baden, Steiermark, Acrea |
| Died | 20 May 2005 (aged 81) |
| Occupation |
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| Known for | Crystallising and promoting the cultural economic practices of Gylias |
Audrey Epstein (Gylic transcription: Odyre Epyştain; 25 September 1923 – 20 May 2005) was an Acrean–Gylian merchant banker, entrepreneur, writer, and salonnière. Ascending to a leading unofficial role in the National Cooperative Confederation, she was influential in crystallising and promoting the distinctive practices of Gylias' cultural industries, earning her the sobriquet "queen of Gylias' entertainment industry".
Early life
Audrey Epstein was born on 25 September 1923 in Baden. She was the second of three children. Her brothers would go on to political careers: her older brother Maximilian in Acrea with the Acrean People's Party, and her younger brother Peter in Gylias with the Democratic Communist Party.
She came from a well-off family of merchant bankers, and had a cosmopolitan upbringing. She attended university in Trier, where she studied the history of the Ivorian Era, completing a degree.
Banking
After graduating from university, she followed in her parents' footsteps and began to work as a stockbroker at one of Acrea's leading banks.
She displayed an aptitude for the occupation and received a promotion. Her banking background proved vital for her later Gylian career, as it honed her talent for working with money and gave her crucial knowledge of international banking.
Audrey was very close to her younger brother Peter, who gained a reputation as the black sheep of the family. Peter left Acrea in 1947 to join the International Brigades during the Liberation War; his outraged family disowned him in response. Audrey strongly opposed the decision and defended her brother. She regularly corresponded with Peter during the war, and became fascinated with his accounts of life in the Free Territories.
Gylias
Audrey resigned from her job and moved with her family to Gylias in 1958, shortly after the war ended. She found work with the National Cooperative Confederation, concentrating on the cultural industries sector. Aided by her considerable charm and savings, which she'd brought with her in cash, she rapidly accumulated great influence in the field.
In short order, she was recognised as the leading woman in Gylias' cultural industries. She retained this clout and prestige for the rest of her career, playing a key role in shaping Gylias' cultural industries after the war.
Ideals
Audrey worked in the context of an economic transformation begun by the Free Territories and achieved by Gylias, which built a non-capitalist economy. Peter recalled that she was thrilled by this development and excited to apply her banking skills and knowledge in such an unconventional context.
A lifelong lover of the arts, she set out to build on the Free Territories' foundation by fostering an environment in which artists were appreciated and rewarded by society for their work, and exploitation and swindling were banished from the cultural industries. She was helped in this regard by the emergence of a robust cultural policy under the Darnan Cyras government, and the close partnerships she formed with culture minister Eoni Nalion and Arts Council chair Tomoko Tōsaka.
The cornerstone of her vision would be the ideal that artists would receive "the full fruit of their labour".
Methods
Audrey began by codifying and promoting the economic practices that had emerged at a smaller scale in the Free Territories, and working to bring them about at a national scale. Significant advantages here included the formation of the NCC itself, which provided a vital degree of coordination, and the great expansion of transportation infrastructure, which made communication and coordination throughout Gylias easier.
Audrey embraced a multi-pronged approach to achieve her ideal: eliminating intermediaries, disentangling the production and distribution of art, stifling the role of publishers, and giving artists full power over their careers. This manifested in different ways depending on the field: musicians creating their own record labels to control their work, a strategy popularised by the Beaties, was harder to apply in the more complex process of film or television production.
She brought in a model of complete separation between artistic production and distribution. Record labels, film studios, and publishing houses' role was reduced to producing copies to meet demand. She pushed for concert venues, cinemas, and the like to be owned by municipal governments, a consortium of nationwide distributors, or organised as non-profits by volunteers. In this way, municipal governments or the consortium paid for maintenance of the venues, allowing performers to take all the money from ticket sales.
Audrey realised the consortium by creating a collective fund within the NCC. Once creators had been paid and wages for employees paid, any profits earned by producers and distributors was automatically redirected into the collective fund. The money from the collective fund went towards the upkeep of cultural venues, aid for artists and performers during difficult times, and covering the cost of free festivals, open-air cinemas, and so on.
The collective fund and its organisation contributed to Audrey's reputation as a strong champion of artists and consumer protection. She used her clout and contacts with law enforcement to guarantee that producers' and distributors' accounts were thoroughly and regularly audited, with harsh sanctions for those who withheld profits from the collective fund. She took her banking knowledge to the National Tax Agency, ensuring that any entertainer's records were scoured for the slightest hint of tax evasion, with dire consequences for those caught in the act.
Results
Audrey succeeded in solidifying and spreading a set of economic practices that set Gylias' cultural industries apart in Tyran. The artist-driven and cooperative framework it created great gains for Gylian culture. Popular culture assumed a central role in the Golden Revolution, and Gylias' resulting "land of musicians and artists" reputation proved so attractive as to launch the "Gylian Magnet" phenomenon.
Her work in the cultural field fit in perfectly with the Golden Revolution, and was aided by similar transformations throughout Gylian society, including the creation of robust social security and the provision of public dividends from the profits of public organisations and the Gylian National Investment Fund.
While Audrey may not have managed to guarantee that artists and creators would receive 100% of the money earned by their work, she did secure an environment where money went to them first, and afterwards they could negotiate for fixed payments or splits with those that helped them distribute their work, such as publishers, promoters, managers, and so forth.
One reflection of her achievement was that the National Prices Board rapidly reduced prices for vinyl records, concert tickets, and cinema tickets because the supply rapidly increased to meet demand, making them among the most affordable in Tyran. Indeed, she boasted about the explosive growth of the music industry following the massive commercial success of the Beaties, joking that it was "the nearest thing Gylias has to a perpetual motion machine".
Public image
Audrey was easily recognisable for her Levystile skirt suit, fake fur hat, and white gloves, which she always wore in public. She wore her hair short and never took off her hat in public, leading her younger brother to joke that he was one of the few people to have seen her hair.
She drove a modified Megelanese sports car, which was her prized possession, and lived in a mansion on the outskirts of Mişeyáke, which she dubbed the "House of Culture". She led a modest lifestyle, in keeping with her principle — "I'm not here to get rich, I'm here to enrich others!". Close friends noted her severely limited wardrobe, which consisted entirely of copies of her trademark suit.
Audrey's formal job title, a simple consultant to the NCC, proved "laughably inadequate" to her power, better reflected in the sobriquet "queen of Gylias' entertainment industry". She possessed an elegant presence and abundant charm, which were the main tools she used to persuade others to follow her suggestions. Additionally, the sizeable savings she'd brought with her in Acrean marks afforded her the money to entertain extravagantly, pay for some of her policies out of pocket, and impress others with her generosity and gifts.
Fluent in German, French, and English, she easily moved among the public, celebrity circles, and public servants alike. One of her favourite venues was Sibylla, where she enjoyed the company of her close friend Jane Russell; guests noted their remarkably similar appearance and would teasingly ask if they were siblings.
She organised a salon at her home, which was attended by some of Gylias' most influential tastemakers and cultural policymakers.
Audrey was enthusiastic about using the media to promote her vision of organising the economic side of Gylian culture. She gave interviews on television and radio, appeared on panel shows and talk shows, and wrote articles for newspapers and magazines. She was so famous that when she appeared as a mystery guest on What Do I Do?, the loud cheers from the audience helped the hosts guess her identity quickly.
One of Audrey's notable eccentricities was asking people to refer to her as "Miss Epstein". Normally, Gylian society sees calling somebody by their surname as an insult. However, Audrey was able to popularise her preferred nomenclature, which reflected her high esteem, the public seeing her as a champion of artists, performers, and consumers. Haruka Morishima of the Beaties famously called her Epushutain-sama in interviews. She was so successful in this regard that during one dinner with Peter in 1986, she quipped, "You're the only one left who calls me Audrey."
Later career
In the 1980s, Audrey took an interest in the development of the computer industry in Gylias and the Infotel service. She saw digital distribution as the future of popular culture, and used her power to influence the cultural industries to undertake serious preparations. This would pay off with the growth of the internet in Gylias in the 1990s, particularly with the publinet being established to provide digital distribution for culture and the arts.
She was pleased to see the economic practices she helped establish adapt to new trends from the 1990s onward, including the emergence of the blockbuster successes of Dreamwave Productions, more lavishly produced concerts and tours, and video gaming coming into its own as a medium and art form.
In 1993, she published her autobiography, A Banker Among Artists. It earned positive reviews and was a commercial bestseller; L'Petit Écho praised the book's "warm and witty voice", which it compared to Jane Russell. She went on to write a series of books about the Gylian cultural industries, which Gylias Review described as "indispensable guides for anyone wanting to learn about the business side of Gylian culture, written by the woman with the most extensive contribution to shaping it."
She was interviewed for Rasa Ḑeşéy's 1999 documentary Nation Building.
She was nominated by President Anina Bergmann for a term in the Senate, serving from 1 March to 1 June 2001.
In her later years, she expressed her worry that the methods she'd used to consolidate Gylias' cultural economic practices had contributed to a tendency of insularity and focus on the domestic market. She lamented the "reflexive distrust or disregard" towards international markets and urged creators to be more conscious of foreign audiences and their potential, and not treat the Gylian Invasion as "something that happened by chance and only happened again through gehenta."
Private life
Audrey married her husband in 1947. The marriage lasted until her death, and the couple had three children.
She was a liberal, and attributed the successes of post-war Gylias to "the constraining presence and wisdom of the Donatellists". She generally showed little interest in politics, and mainly kept her political beliefs private so they wouldn't threaten her friendships.
She was mainly a practitioner of Asuryan, regularly attending her local hof.
She was noted for maintaing a classical sense of decorum in her life — even her brother Peter dressed in a suit and tie every time he visited her. She found great inspiration in the work of Ðaina Levysti, and was impressed with the importance Gylians placed on clothing, describing them as "sober-minded, disciplined, responsible people" at odds with their stereotypes.
She was a stalwart champion of closer relations between Acrea and Gylias. At an official function, the Acrean ambassador to Gylias quipped, "You've been an ambassador far longer than I have!".
Death
Audrey died on 20 May 2005, aged 81, of natural causes.
She was granted a state funeral by President Laura Varnaþ, which columnist Keie Nanei described as "fit for a queen, not of a country, but of our entertainment industries."