The Man Who Owns the News (22 page)

Downe, who, like Felker, sees Murdoch as an easy mark, is trying to lure Murdoch to become an investor in his business. But Murdoch doesn’t especially like Downe—he finds him a disengaged, lazy, snobbish figure. What’s more, he can’t afford a meaningful stake in Downe’s company—and he isn’t, if he can help it, a noncontrolling investor. And he really wants a newspaper.

In 1973, not long after he buys the San Antonio papers (there are afternoon and morning papers, which he merges into one), Murdoch meets Felker at a dinner party Kay Graham of the
Washington Post
throws for him. Graham is Murdoch’s one substantial contact in the newspaper business in the United States. Graham’s father, Eugene Meyer, knew his father. When Rupert was younger, they socialized in each other’s countries as visiting newspaper royalty. Murdoch, not long after he settled in the United States, began to fantasize about buying the
Washington Post.
Or, with only slightly less grandiosity, he considered competing with the
Post,
eyeing the
Washington Star.
Washington would be a suitable base for him. That would give him liftoff. But he hesitated. It was an unusual moment of sentiment, his decision not to compete with Graham, or an unusual moment of caution and fear. He judged her a scary competitor. What’s more, he couldn’t remotely afford the
Star
—although he never strictly aligned his plans with his bank account.

Sentiment will not save Clay Felker (though thirty years after he buys Felker’s company and cuts short Felker’s meteoric rise in the media business, Murdoch will voice brief regret about losing the friendship).

Like Murdoch, Felker is an outsider in New York. He’s a midwesterner, from Missouri. His relationship to the New York establishment is to hustle it and to thrive in spite of it—or on a parallel track to it. In
New York
magazine, he perceives that the city’s establishment is on the verge of transition and that his magazine could become the old establishment’s rival.

Felker, the city’s most successful media upstart, is a sort of New York Svengali—in the pages of the magazine and in the emerging new social scene in New York, he’s creating a set of personalities and defining new centers of power to compete with the old.

He is, in this, a perfect if unwitting tutor for Murdoch.

At Felker’s suggestion, in the summer of 1974, Murdoch takes a house in East Hampton, just through the hedges from Felker’s own house.

Felker spends a good part of the summer monologizing Murdoch about the New York media scene—who’s up, who’s down, who’s going after whom. It is partly through Felker’s example that Murdoch figures out the dangers of a summer house in East Hampton, Manhattan’s media enclave by the beach—it’s too exposed, the conversation too uncontrolled, the gossip too unguarded. Wounding Felker, Murdoch buys a house in upstate New York, a farm in Old Chatham. But Felker is working Murdoch (at least he believes he is the one doing the working, rather than the reverse). Felker sees Murdoch as his discovery. Many of Murdoch’s initial acquaintances and introductions in New York are through Felker.

Felker suggests what schools the Murdoch children should attend. Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth, age six, enrolls at the Nightingale-Bamford School on the Upper East Side, then a year later switches, trading up to The Brearley School on East 83rd Street. His daughter Prudence and son Lachlan enter Dalton, on East 91st Street.

There isn’t any more distilled collection of the ambitious, the determined, the wealthy in Manhattan than at a handful of schools mostly on the Upper East Side. The parent body is some ideal combination of the hereditary social set, the most economically powerful at a given moment, the lawyers and bankers who work for them, and a dollop of celebrities, together with all of their spouses. Clubbiness and ensuing relationships and connections is one of the reasons you go (or have your children go) to these schools. Oddly, it’s a world that rather appeals to Murdoch. It isn’t Geelong Grammar. It’s much more fluid, commercial. It’s where the elite meet—but to do some business. There isn’t much more pretense here than the pretense of moving up. Such schools are not just where smart children make lifelong connections but, also, where smart parents hook up. In the history of New York schools and the connections they facilitated, none may be so profitable as the introduction of Stan Shuman of Allen and Company to Rupert Murdoch at a parent function at the Dalton School, where Shuman’s son Michael, and Murdoch’s son Lachlan, both five, are in kindergarten together.

Murdoch takes naturally to the New York form of hustle—to its efficiency, its lack of pretense, its dollar domination. In London it is tricky to just call somebody up—that would be a downright suspicious move. In New York, you can connect seamlessly with anyone. Murdoch, a reluctant socializer, is a brilliant networker. He’s one of the early geniuses of the form. It’s a form that lacks prescribed social niceties and inefficiencies and thrives on direct value-added chat: just who you know. The Murdoch progress in New York is all about efficiently extracting information.

In the beginning, it is not clear who’s hustling whom. Felker, along with most everyone else in New York, assumes that Murdoch is the rich foreigner, hence easy pickings. The rush to offer him things is not to benefit him but to take advantage of his optimistic newcomer’s buying mood. One would be foolish not to seize the opportunity that a rich foreigner presented.

When Felker introduces Murdoch to Dolly Schiff, the owner of the
New York Post
(seventy-three-year-old Schiff has a crush on fifty-one-year-old Felker), he knows he is introducing a potential seller to a wannabe player in a manic buying mood. Both Felker and Schiff think they’ve lucked into something a little too easy. Murdoch, with his I’ll-buy-anything purchase of the San Antonio papers and his hapless launch of the embarrassing
National Star
—his low-end tabloid meant to compete with the
National Enquirer
—seems like pretty classic dumb money.

When Murdoch goes down to the Allen and Company offices and engages Shuman to represent him in the matter of Dolly Schiff’s
New York Post
(Shuman’s first assignment is to sit next to Schiff at a dinner party Murdoch will shortly throw), Shuman too is rightly skeptical. But a fee is a fee.

Nobody quite knows that the deal-making style Murdoch is developing is that of the available outsider. To be underestimated is a cultivated part of his affect. The advantage of always moving on—a key advantage of the con man—is that it takes a while for your reputation to catch up with you.

What he’s already done in London, now he’ll do in New York.

The fading newspaper business—in the first of its many fadeouts, television and growing labor problems having depressed the value of papers in the sixties and seventies—gives Murdoch certain advantages. He can afford to buy himself both exposure (owning a paper makes you a public figure) and, because he has an appetite for vividness, cash flow (the more blood, the more sales).

Of the three daily New York papers in 1976, the
Post,
which, for two generations has been the sentimental favorite of working-class Jews, is the marginal one, not least of all because there aren’t any working-class Jews anymore. The first death-of-the-newspaper moment is just about coming to an end (it got into full swing with the great New York newspaper strikes of 1962–63 and 1966, which resulted in the closing of four of the city’s seven dailies). Across the country, afternoon papers—the
Post
in the seventies is an afternoon paper—have closed or merged with morning papers. Most urban markets are moving toward the consolidation into single-owner markets.

The
New York Times
has the quality, Manhattan-centric market; the
Daily News
has the working-class outer-borough market. Unless one of those two wants to acquire the
Post,
there is not going to be any other logical buyer. Murdoch, in some sense, is an old-fashioned newspaper buyer: a man who believes that showmanship—being a better carnival barker—can save the day. He is, furthermore, another classic sort of newspaper buyer: a rich man who wants a platform (forgetting the fact that he isn’t all that rich at the moment). In 1974, those two characteristics make him a market of one.

While Dolly Schiff probably has the wherewithal to maintain the
Post
’s cash needs, she is deeply relieved—and somewhat incredulous—to find an interested, charming (she is famously susceptible to charming men), promising buyer. Actually, many other people in New York, in its journalism and media community, in its political circles, are relieved too—the anemic
Post
is about to be rejuvenated.

Overnight, Murdoch is a pet of the city. There’s little goodwill he isn’t accorded. On the night he makes the deal for the
Post,
he and his small team, along with the lawyers from Squadron, Ellenoff and Stan Shuman and his people at Allen and Company, take a limo from the “21” Club, where the deal is signed, and go on to further celebrations at Elaine’s, the restaurant-bar at the center of the journalist-media-political chattering class that is entirely ready to embrace Murdoch. “You did it! You fucking did it!” Elaine’s proprietor, Elaine Kaufman, shouts at Murdoch as he comes through the door.

Murdoch, in one move, has achieved insider status in the city. This is what people like Murdoch—if not Murdoch himself—aspire to. It’s power, affirmation, and a great social life. You become part of a rarefied and constantly self-congratulating class. This is irresistible for most every ambitious person—perhaps even more so for a foreigner, an outsider.

One night at Elaine’s is apparently enough.

He proceeds to chuck it all with his hostile pursuit of
New York
magazine.

He does this even before he’s the formal owner of the
Post
. The
Post
is his on December 30, 1976. One day later, news of his attempt to take over
New York
magazine hits the
New York Times.
As he’s being congratulated for his takeover of the
Post,
he’s effectively waging a stealth campaign—quite like the stealth campaign he’ll be waging in thirty years for the
Journal
—against the people who are congratulating him.

As much as the
Journal
represents, second only to the
New York Times,
the official establishment voice,
New York
magazine in 1976 represents the official voice of, well, an evening at Elaine’s.

Born in 1968 out of the
Herald Tribune
(it began as the paper’s rotogravure magazine supplement), it is, in a sense, the inheritor of the city’s great newspapers—the
Journal American
, the
World-Telegram,
and the
Sun,
which all closed during the strikes of the 1960s.
New York
magazine, which in the 1980s will come to articulate and be the poster child for the new money culture in New York, began as a reinvention, or last gasp, of New York’s newspaper culture. Which was precisely what has caught Murdoch’s eye: its tough-guy flamboyance, its newsprint bona fides and romance. (The facts that the tough-guy newsmen will turn against Murdoch and that under Murdoch
New York
will become the great yuppie magazine are another story—a further irony of time and circumstance.)

Murdoch’s takeover of
New York
—his sense of the opportunity, his stalking of the magazine, his flipping of its investors—is among those events that make Murdoch Murdoch. Or it’s the story out of which other people make Murdoch Murdoch.

The facts, the actual chain of events, of who said what to whom, become part of an imbroglio nearly ideological in its density, conspiratorial in its motivations. It’s a Rashomon moment that will recur with so many of the Murdoch deals—everybody has his own version of how Murdoch manages to do what he shouldn’t, logically, be able to do.

The writer Susan Braudy will later recount in meticulous detail her weekend in East Hampton at the Felker house with her then-boyfriend,
New York
magazine writer Aaron Latham, and their trip through the hedges to have dinner at Rupert and Anna’s, served, charmingly, by Elisabeth and Lachlan, at which Felker reveals his frustrations with his board—and Murdoch discusses only the price of paper. This same conversation, or at least one similar enough, is said to take place with different secondary participants in a taxicab or at a Yankees game or at Murdoch’s house in upstate New York.

What is clear is that on one side there is Felker and his writers and, on the other, a set of board members who have grown weary of Felker for the most predictable reasons: He spends too much money and gets all the attention.

It’s a difficult bunch. Each board member is, in his fashion, a serious prima donna. Among them are the chairman, Alan Patricof, a small-time investor who, with his flip of the company, will turn himself into one of the city’s best-known media financiers; Carter Burden, the heir to Cornelius W. Vanderbilt and one of the most significant social figures in the city (he and his wife, Amanda Burden, the stepdaughter of CBS founder Bill Paley, were a New York “it” couple of the 1960s—Amanda Burden went on to marry Warner Communications chief, and Murdoch nemesis, Steve Ross); Bartle Bull, another WASP society figure; and the board’s counsel, Ted Kheel, the most prominent labor negotiator in the city.

The striking thing is not the disputatiousness, irascibility, and egocentricity of the
New York
magazine board—although, even for a media company board, it is rather extreme—but that Murdoch is able to corral and manage them. One of the reasons Murdoch’s ultimate acquisition of the company comes as such a shock to Felker is Felker’s perfectly reasonable judgment that nobody could deal with this colossally dysfunctional group. There is nothing in Murdoch’s background to explain why he should have the political and social skills to deal with some of the most serious egomaniacs in New York. Indeed,
New York
magazine is, in so many ways, a New York thing, as distinguished from a business thing. He would seem to have as reasonable a chance of prevailing in this world as an automaker from, say, Seoul would have arriving in Detroit.