Fifi Box on her love life, being a mum and all those rumours
MEDIA personality Fifi Box breaks her silence about being a tabloid magnet, raising her daughter right and becoming an early riser. But about that love life...
Stellar
Don't miss out on the headlines from Stellar. Followed categories will be added to My News.
FIFI Box has been pregnant 32 times in the past five years, involved in several love triangles and is now secretly dating Russell Crowe. Next week, she is liable to start feuding with one of her radio show co-hosts, irk her bosses at The Project by jetting off to Europe without warning or abruptly dump Crowe for 21-year-old Australian model Jordan Barrett.
It’s anyone’s guess, really — and Box says she is just as surprised as the rest of Australia by the near-daily headlines she manages to make. “I don’t understand the interest,” Box tells Stellar. “I’m just not that exciting. I have never even met [Russell Crowe]!” She lets out a dramatic, exasperated laugh. “I get a shock some Monday mornings when I wake up to another ridiculous magazine cover.”
The stories came tumbling forth, Box reckons, after her daughter Trixie was born in 2013. “It was like a circus,” she says. “And I couldn’t control it. I am not kidding — I have had every headline.”
ASHER KEDDIE: ‘WE CAN, AND SHOULD, SPEAK UP’
SAM ARMYTAGE: ‘DON’T ATTACK ME FOR BEING BEAUTIFUL’
If Crowe and Box aren’t a couple, they do have at least one thing in common: each has been driven to the extremes of frustration by coverage of their love lives. Crowe likes to vent his spleen on Twitter; Box merely disengages. There are no confirmations or denials from her camp. She does not bother to discuss the rumours on her top-rating Fox FM breakfast radio show, nor during her Tuesday night appearances on Network Ten’s The Project.
Yet Box makes a pay cheque by talking — she has to fill 15 hours of airtime each week on the radio — and is a self-described “chatterbox”. Still, she is surprisingly tight-lipped when pushed to discuss the inner workings of her personal life.
Before sitting down with Stellar for her first proper interview in years, Box, 41, makes it clear she will not be spilling about boyfriends, past or present. “I would spend my life putting out spot fires if I addressed every rumour,” she says. “It becomes a mouth to feed.”
This has been her policy since Beatrix Belle Box came into the world. “I didn’t used to be so private. Being a mum was a game-changer — before that I was a bit frivolous. I needed to set parameters to protect her.”
Of course, that decision was like a red rag to a bull for the paparazzi, who were eager to discover the identity of Trixie’s father. To this day, Box has never officially confirmed that ironman Grant Kenny is Trixie’s dad. Asked if she ever considered a tell-all to put an end to years of whispers, Box nods. Then she points out even that wouldn’t guarantee privacy. “I have had times when I’ve gone on the record or clarified something and then fast-forward a couple of weeks and it actually doesn’t matter.”
Box doesn’t have the same qualms about sharing secrets with close friends and colleagues. Her Project co-host Carrie Bickmore marvels at Box’s energy, telling Stellar that “she comes in having been up since 4am and always has a smile on her face. No matter how tired she is, whether she has a cold, or has been up with her daughter during the night, she is positive and friendly and warm. It’s nice to have a true friend in the industry like Fifi.”
Retired AFL player Brendan Fevola points to her aid in helping him transition to his gig as a radio host. The colleagues have bonded over parenting daughters — he and his partner Alex are expecting their fourth later this year — and intense intrusions into their personal lives. “It’s all part of the territory but I know it can be tough,” he says. “It’s good to have that support.”
Box agrees. “I am pretty thick-skinned,” she says. “But I have friends who really struggle with it; it riddles them with anxiety. Within my group, a lot of us are happy when one of the others takes one for the team and is on a magazine cover. We’ll text each other and say, ‘Hey, thanks!’”
It’s not always a laughing matter. Box recalls being hounded by photographers when she was fresh out of hospital with her newborn daughter. “My intention was to not post photos of her on Instagram because she didn’t buy into [fame], but when she was five days old we were followed to the hospital where my poor dear granny was passing away. I then made the decision that I would control this because, from a young age, she has had strange men following her down the street.
“We couldn’t walk out the front door. So now I share so she doesn’t have to be followed or stalked or have men confront her with a big camera.”
Box isn’t opposed to sharing some intimacies with her listeners. She was one of the first entertainers to detail being sexually assaulted in her workplace, revealing on her radio show last year that she had been pushed forcefully into the crotch of a much older international celebrity during an interview over a decade ago.
“I told this story before the #MeToo movement. It was really just talking through an incident that concerned me... I was looking back on my younger self, wishing I’d had the courage to speak up,” she tells Stellar.
“I felt that young people needed to hear that it’s OK to stand up to someone violating your personal space — regardless of their status or influence. In my case I was young, inexperienced and felt powerless. I also naively thought I should be a good sport and laugh along with the behaviour of a very famous man because nobody around me was intervening or condemning his actions.” She says it resulted in many listeners of both genders phoning in with their own tales of mistreatment.
Much like Jennifer Aniston, Box exudes the kind of girl-next-door charm that keeps her onside with fans, popular with her peers and a go-to tabloid cover girl. Also like Aniston, when she’s snapped at the wrong angle or in an unflattering outfit, speculation ramps up.
For what it’s worth, Box tells Stellar, she is not opposed to more children. But, she says, “It’s something I don’t actively think about. A great friend told me it’s really important to just be grateful for what you’ve got. And I really am. I am also open to opportunities and what is around the corner.”
With a young daughter and a hectic career to manage, Box has to be picky about her projects. But when the Seven Network offered her a gig hosting its new reality show The Single Wives, she couldn’t refuse. “The dating-show genre is my guilty pleasure. I watch them all. These people who put themselves out there are amazing.”
The Single Wives follows four previously married women learning to date again with the help of British relationship expert Matthew Hussey. Box is filled with admiration for Hussey’s skills, but hastens to add he hasn’t helped her sharpen her own pick-up prowess as she, quite simply, doesn’t put herself out there.
No Tinder. No internet dating. Box says she instead lives vicariously through her friends and that swag of shows she’s addicted to watching to learn about the new rules of romance. Her own relationships, she confesses, have been forged at work or through mutual friends — and at times when she wasn’t looking for love. She says she has never been in a mad rush to settle down, admitting she has often put her career before her love life.
But Box’s career, in many ways, may always be her first love. Her dreams of being on radio were forged in the pre-digital era, and her father still has a cassette tape she made as a kid, on which she plays a successful radio DJ she calls Jane Watson. To this day, she remains amused she chose such an innocuous name.
Box was a shy child, but her talents were recognised when she was made school captain at Tintern Grammar in Melbourne’s outer eastern suburbs. Her behaviour was sometimes less than perfect, but she got away with it by talking fast and turning on the charm for her teachers. She later lasted six months studying arts at The University of Melbourne before moving elsewhere for a different performing arts program. At one stage she considered acting, but after being rejected by NIDA she took up commercial radio broadcasting. She cut her teeth on regional radio before taking a huge gamble on the offer of a single late-night broadcast — without pay — on Sydney’s Triple M.
Box packed up her Ford Festiva and hit the road. She crashed on a friend’s floor near the beach and spent weeks working pre-dawn shifts, getting coffees and answering phones. One day, it happened: she was asked to fill in for Amanda Keller, who had gone on maternity leave. That soon led to a drivetime position and the eventual realisation that maybe she could make a fist of radio after all.
Fifteen years later, Box is still with the Austereo network, but she’s moved back to Melbourne where she’s been part of the city’s highest-rating FM breakfast team since 2014. After originally sharing the airwaves with Dave Thornton, today she co-hosts alongside Fevola and Byron Cooke.
“I see it as such a brilliant opportunity to wake up with a city,” she says. “It’s like a living organism, a breakfast radio show. It moves with the topics of the day and the relationship I have with the listeners and also with the guys I work with [is special]. I am in a sweet spot — I work with two of my best mates, which makes every morning. The downside is I am sleep-deprived and it’s hard to have energy for other people, so I have to be really careful where I apply and channel my energy in life.”
To keep on schedule, she relies on a devoted nanny who reports for duty at 4.30am each weekday so Box can make it to the studio on time. After the broadcast, and while the rest of Melbourne is just getting to work, Box usually heads into meetings before collecting Trixie from school in the afternoon. “Then we play and we have play dates [with other children],” she says. “I want to be a very present mum. The only problem with the hours and the job is that I have a child who is a night owl. It’s killing me. I don’t know why — but she’s like a party animal.”
Aside from her nanny, Box also relies on a close network of friends and family to help raise Trixie. And no, she is not spending her weekends pre-preparing and freezing meals for the week ahead. “I am not that mum,” she says, giggling. “I’m the, ‘What do you want to order from Uber Eats?’ mum.”
She’s also the type who is hell-bent on fostering a positive sense of body image and self-confidence in her young daughter. “I am a great warrior for women just being themselves,” she says.
“I want [Trixie] to embrace herself; I don’t want her having some alien-type Kardashian figure. I want her to be herself. And look, I do things for my own wellbeing. I do Pilates. I have a personal trainer.I am happier now — in my personal life, in my body, in my face — than ever. All the insecurities and concerns that maybe wreaked havoc on me in my teens, my 20s and even my early 30s... they have just gone. I have never been more content.”
The Single Wives premieres 7.30pm, July 18, on the Seven Network.
READ MORE EXCLUSIVES FROM STELLAR.
Originally published as Fifi Box on her love life, being a mum and all those rumours