The Man Who Owns the News (19 page)

Murdoch, arriving in England, hasn’t bought himself marvelous cash-flow-producing prestigious brands with his new businesses, as he will in the future. This isn’t the world of private equity, of financial logic (an amount invested produces a predictable amount returned), of cutting costs to produce more free cash. It’s sweat equity. The harder you work, the quicker you respond, the cheaper you do it, the greater chance you have of making your business work. The difference here is that Murdoch, acting like the narrow-focused, tight-fisted, do-what’s-necessary manager of a gasket-making company in, say, Manchester, is acting like this in the newspaper business in London. He doesn’t get that all eyes are on him.

One of Murdoch’s early “scoops” at the
News of the World
is to serialize the memoirs of Christine Keeler, the call girl who six years earlier was at the center of Britain’s biggest postwar sex scandal, the Profumo Affair. The thing is, John Profumo, the disgraced defense secretary, has devoted his postscandal life to charitable works and is now seen as something of a paragon of British social virtue. Thus Murdoch becomes the rude so-and-so for dredging up the whole sordid mess. The Press Council, an industry self-monitoring group, issues a public condemnation of the Keeler series. In a huff, Cardinal Heenan, Britain’s ranking Roman Catholic, pulls an article he had agreed to write for the
News of the World.
The Profumo Affair becomes the Murdoch Affair.

Murdoch himself—pleased to have sold more copies with the Keeler story than the
News of the World
usually sold—seems strangely casual and unconcerned about the backlash. Demonstrating that he’s not averse to a public role but that he has little comprehension of its nature, he uses the controversy to get himself on television.

On the air he’s artless: “I don’t agree it’s sleazy for a minute,” he says to the interviewer, David Dimbleby, in I-am-not-a-crook fashion. “Nor do I agree that it’s unfair to the man. I have the greatest sympathy with him, but it doesn’t alter the fact that everybody knows what happened. Certainly it’s going to sell newspapers.”

It is, however, his interview with David Frost, in the autumn of 1969, after publication of the Keeler article, that puts Murdoch—as well as Frost—on the map. Frost’s show has been running on London Weekend Television for three weeks when, as Frost will later say in his memoir, “it caught fire” with “an interview with a new arrival on the London scene.”

The interview is notable, on Frost’s part, for its heavy shocked-
shocked
tone—as though Murdoch’s even bringing up the Profumo Affair, one of the most well-covered scandals in British history, was simply outrageous behavior. It’s notable for the ferocity of Frost’s attack—sarcastic, prosecutorial, and sanctimonious. And notable for Murdoch’s implacableness: His instinct is to resist and inflame, rather than smooth and mollify. And notable because Murdoch completely bombs.

Frost himself assumes that Murdoch will sidestep the issue with some sort of mild mea culpa so that the show, which Murdoch has been convinced by Frost will be “friendly,” will focus largely on an Australian entrepreneur’s success in London.

But Murdoch, accompanied by Anna, Bert Hardy, and his PR man, John Addey, runs right into it. His own conception of himself as a hands-on, man-in-a-hurry, commercially astute guy—characteristics that in another decade or so would become de rigueur for every entrepreneur—morphs publicly into the figure of the dark, morally suspect, sadistic villain. It’s a relentless forty minutes in which Murdoch, with evident pride, takes practically full responsibility for the Keeler book excerpt.

“I certainly subedited a tremendous amount out of the book,” he proclaims.

“You have done that yourself?” confirms Frost, before holding him to account: “Since we talked on the phone this afternoon, I spent four dismal hours reading through the [Keeler] manuscript. What did you think of it when you read it?”

Thus begins perhaps the only public inquiry into Murdoch’s tabloid philosophy.

“What is your argument of positive merit?” demands Frost. And this becomes his leitmotif: making Murdoch define the good he does.

“Arguments of positive merit in this is that for the first time the whole story is being told,” Murdoch tries.

“But it’s not,” says Frost. “All these books have come out….”

Murdoch retreats. There is nothing wrong, he says, “in telling a story twice.”

“If you admit that the story has been told twice, then we are making progress,” says Frost, treating Murdoch like an errant schoolboy. “But, I mean, you started off by saying there were new things. I went through this. I combed this through very carefully and I could not find any new facts in it at all except a couple of minor personalities.”

Then, midway in the show, a taped interview with Cardinal Heenan is introduced, which Murdoch says he wasn’t told about. The prelate excoriates Murdoch on air and defends the worthiness of John Profumo’s current philanthropy.

Frost then singles out John Addey, sitting in the audience, for clapping loudly when Murdoch defends himself. “Your PR man’s going mad again. Your PR man is the only person who’s applauded—you must give him a raise.”

And then there is a point where, with narrowed eyes, Murdoch seems to focus on his position. The entire controversy has been whipped up, he says, “by members of the sort of establishment” who, he analyzes, would not otherwise “want to be seen with Mr. Profumo anywhere.”

Frost cements Murdoch’s position: “That’s an Australian view of England—it really is, you know. I mean, it doesn’t work that way anymore there, you know. It really doesn’t. I mean, of course there a lot of daft old-school ties in this country and so on, but it doesn’t work like that—the Establishment are not as well organized as that.”

“You reckon?” says Murdoch sourly.

The interview, a smash success for Frost (Frost and Murdoch actually occupy similar media places—the first of the independent media entrepreneurs), confirms everybody’s position. Murdoch, to Frost’s audience, is a disreputable, un-British interloper. Britain, to Murdoch, is ruled by a hypocritical, self-sustaining establishment—which, he clearly understands, doesn’t want him. (After the show, Anna says to Frost, who has invited the Murdochs back to the hospitality suite for a drink, “We’ve had enough of your hospitality.”) Everybody’s position, in fact, is enhanced. The establishment rises in condemnation of Murdoch, as Murdoch becomes determined to have his revenge.

Murdoch doesn’t seek to recast himself as a more sympathetic character, more appreciative of British opportunity, more observant of British protocol, more obviously a supplicant to British approval—what any PR specialist or marketing consultant might have suggested. He goes in a radical and opposite direction. He rejects cultural Britishness. His rejection reflects his ever-hardening binary philosophical position: You’re either successful, and hence significant, or you’re not successful, and hence insignificant. And at this point in time, nearly every British institution, commercial strategy, and fundamental method of economic or social problem solving is failing.

It’s a key differentiator. Most, perhaps all, of the entrepreneurs attracted to Britain and rising in it are looking for a broader kind of approval—they have major social aspirations—whereas Murdoch is only market-driven. Earlier than most, he understands what will become the central trend of the last quarter of the century: Success trumps.

What’s more, he seems, in contravention of his conservative personality, to understand that the deftest commercial strategy in Britain is the affront. From the Rolling Stones to the
Sun
’s bare-breasted Page 3 girls, any slap at convention in this passive if disapproving society promotes you.

And yet, he is no rebel. He certainly never sees himself as louche, rude, or disreputable, nor, as moguls are apt to, larger than life. That is part of his constant irritation with Robert Maxwell, his confounding doppelgänger, who
is
louche, rude, disreputable, and large (He’s “mad,” Murdoch will often say). In some sense, Murdoch is a perfect antiestablishment storm—precisely because he believes he
is
the establishment in his very core. He is a perfectly presentable, perfectly well-bred, exceedingly mannerly, highly competent business executive, without personal eccentricities or evident grandiosity, who owns ever more politically conservative newspapers. He isn’t trying to upset the establishment or take from it. Rather, he is its legitimate defender (to the extent that the establishment is one in his image). As his Free Church Scottish ancestors believed they were the true Church and the established church the pretenders, so for Rupert.

Storming out of the Frost show, he says to Bert Hardy about London Weekend Television, the producers of the show: “I will buy this company.” And he does.

He will note to me almost forty years later that he hasn’t spoken to Frost since.

“I feel like saying, ‘I’ll get the bastard one day,’” Murdoch will say to me, adding ruefully, “but he’ll die before I get him.”

The
News of the World
establishes Murdoch as a new and unnatural character in British public life. He becomes—and will continue to be for over four decades—the “Dirty Digger,” in the characterization and nomenclature of
Private Eye,
the satirical weekly. To be called a digger—first used to refer to the Aussie soldiers sent to their deaths by British officers at Gallipoli—is something of a compliment among Australians. In
Private Eye
’s usage, it becomes both a reference to
News of the World
’s reporting on dirty laundry and an ethnic slur.

But it is the
Sun
that makes Murdoch a player in Britain, and whose success makes it possible for him to show little or no interest in submitting to, as it were, British rule.

After building up, over almost twenty years, his Australian chain of more or less tabloidy newspapers (most of them more middle-market than downmarket), one of his central business perceptions is that Britain, that storied destination of ambitious Australian hacks, has only one significant daily tabloid—the
Mirror
—and it is putting on untabloid-like airs.

The
Mirror
is owned by IPC and run by the most famous publisher of the day, Hugh Cudlipp. In Murdoch’s view, as he will recall forty years later, Cudlipp has allowed himself to become corrupted; instead of focusing on being a great editor, he is more concerned about hanging out with the “champagne people.” In Murdoch’s telling, Cudlipp has committed the worst sin of newspaper proprietors: He’s turned his back on the working stiffs by trying to take the paper upmarket—and is failing dismally. The
Mirror
was made the biggest-selling paper in postwar Britain by Harry Guy Bartholomew, who, in Murdoch’s encomium, is “a great journalist,” meaning not a great finder of facts but a great packager, showman, and drinker (it makes you a greater packager and showman if you can do this and drink prodigiously at the same time). “He’d be standing in God knows whose bar from about three in the afternoon and have proofs sent to him,” Murdoch will gleefully recall to me. “They had to go to press at four in the afternoon to get the papers to Scotland and everywhere. But he was a great journalist. He was out at the bar, reading these pages and he’d throw them back and say, ‘Put the fucking picture spread back in.’”

According to Murdoch, the
Mirror
“had a lot of spirit in it and it was absolutely anti-establishment and the soldiers’ paper in the war. They loved it. It gravitated across, over a period of twenty years I guess at best, to this paper striving to be something it wasn’t in its past.” The tabloid has, in Murdoch’s view, become preachy and teachy, demonstrating the kind of liberal earnestness and clunkiness that will become one of Murdoch’s favorite targets.

For Murdoch, the competitor—in this instance a self-satisfied and not very spirited one, but one nevertheless with a five million circulation—defines the market. He not only covets this market but, owning the weekly
News of the World,
needs a daily paper to keep the presses busy the rest of the week.

He makes a short, unsuccessful effort to buy the
Daily Sketch,
a fading tabloid owned by Northcliffe’s heirs, Associated Newspapers (the
Daily Sketch
was ultimately folded into the
Daily Mail
), and then begins thinking about starting a tabloid of his own.

Then, in 1969, Robert Maxwell puts the
Sun
into play.

The
Sun
began life as the
Daily Herald,
a left-wing broadsheet owned by the Trade Union Congress, and was the largest-circulation paper in the United Kingdom in the 1930s. After the war, the
Daily Herald
’s circulation went into free fall. IPC, the
Mirror
’s owner, bought the paper in 1961, repositioning it a few years later as a paper for the new youth market and renaming it the
Sun
. With the paper’s circulation continuing on a downward spiral—circulation had fallen by almost half, to 850,000—IPC begins to consider closing it in 1969. With the unions threatening to make trouble for other IPC papers if the
Sun
’s jobs are lost, Maxwell offers to take the paper off IPC’s hands. The understanding is that he’ll cut jobs and run a limited-circulation paper that will not compete with the
Mirror
.

Getting wind of the deal, Murdoch, knowing that the unions would resist the Maxwell plan, writes a “confidential” letter to the “relevant parties,” which include the unions, saying he’d be interested if Maxwell can’t come to an understanding with the unions. Murdoch knows the unions will never let IPC sell to Maxwell if there is an alternative. With Murdoch having gained the support of the unions (whose power he will later destroy), IPC is forced to sell its paper, for a discount price similar to that offered by Maxwell, to the man who would become IPC’s most tenacious competitor.