The Man Who Owns the News (47 page)

So he’s not contrite in the slightest. In fact, he gets his back up.

His mother is uncomprehending and furious. She insults him and belittles Wendi—before even meeting her. Raging and pitiless, she says she will never meet Wendi.
Never
. Closed subject. He, in his turn, storms off and says, well then, he won’t speak to his mother.

With Anna, he is, in her view, “hard, ruthless, and determined” as they discuss a settlement. He refuses to entertain any efforts to salvage the marriage (it is hard to imagine Rupert Murdoch in couples therapy). “In the end, it was not I who got the divorce,” she will tell an Australian interviewer. “He was the one that got the divorce.”

Rupert martyred her, she will claim. “I believe that when you take a vow to be loyal to someone and look after someone all your life, you try to stick to that. You don’t hurt other people for your own happiness.”

This is the view—the greatest sense of moral umbrage and betrayal—taken by Anna’s children. It turns out that Rupert Murdoch, who everyone has always said is a monster,
is
a monster. “I began to think that the Rupert I loved died a long time ago,” Anna will comment in the interview. “The Rupert I fell in love with could not have behaved this way. It was so ruthless.”

In the fall of 1998, Murdoch forces Anna off the board of News Corp. At her last board meeting, she delivers, in the presence of her soon-to-be former husband and her son Lachlan, a scorned-woman valedictory. She says that she has worked for the company since she was eighteen years old and this is not just the end of a marriage but the end of a whole life. Lachlan walks her out after her goodbye, deeply angered by what his father has done.

Prue, on the other hand, whose own mother was done in some thirty years before by Anna, finds herself secretly rooting for Wendi.

The children show up for Rupert and Wendi’s wedding on June 25, 1999, seventeen days after his divorce, but it’s strained, even coerced. The wedding is on
Morning Glory
—the 155-foot yacht he and Anna bought, which Anna thought would be their retirement boat—as it circles Manhattan.

It’s only after the wedding that Wendi tells her parents she’s married Rupert Murdoch: “They don’t know who he was. I showed them a newspaper,” she will later recall. “Power of media!”

To the extent that it is possible to change one of the world’s least uncertain and self-doubting men, Murdoch is, in fact, changed, or rehabbed, by his marriage.

The vanity that he’s been discouraged from indulging—by self-consciousness, by Anna’s staid ideal of elegance, by his own views about conspicuous consumption—is suddenly on display. The new suits—“the man went from being a conservative to suddenly wearing Prada suits,” his daughter Prue will say, in continuing disbelief—the fevered workouts, the hair. The urgency and, to many, the ridiculousness of it, can’t be missed.

It is, at News Corp., an incredibly awkward emperor’s-new-clothes situation because the new look, the new joie de vivre, the new living arrangements—he’s temporarily living in the Mercer Hotel in SoHo, like a rock star—can’t be mentioned. Or isn’t, at any rate. There’s nobody who’s that easy with him. What’s more, he’s not acknowledging it. His hair, although suddenly bright orange, is not an acceptable subject of discussion. (It’s only Prue who chides him.)

And then China. It’s another reason, inside News Corp. and his family, that Wendi represents such a threat: She represents China. In fact, it becomes a bizarre and active piece of speculation within News Corp. about Wendi’s real provenance. Where
really
does she come from? Whom might she be reporting to? And just how is it that she knows Jiang Mianheng, the son of China’s president, Jiang Zemin, so well? Hmm?

Even within the Murdoch family, China and Wendi join together as the wedge issue. In 1999, he sends his son James, then twenty-six, to run Star TV. James, in his conscious or unconscious (but ultimately successful) end run around his brother, bonds with Wendi in China. James is Wendi’s first real ally within the family and within the company. They conspire together over how to take China—or, actually, how not to get taken by China. Because there is a growing understanding—a long time in coming, this understanding—that News Corp.’s China adventure has been a huge disaster. It quite seems that it has been Murdoch, with Chinese stars in his eyes, who has been blind to his ceaseless lack of success here, and his new wife and son who are vastly more realistic.

It’s simple: The Chinese government holds a monopoly on the broadcast business and sees Murdoch as a competitor. It therefore uses all its regulatory might—which is absolute—to frustrate him. Indeed, they allow him in only in ways that will drain and diminish him. It’s a bloody disaster for News Corp.

James’ emphasis becomes shifting the attention of the business from China to other Asian markets. Wendi’s emphasis becomes shifting the business away from broadcast toward striving for something that News Corp. has never done very well: a lighter touch, a greater sense of social nuance. It’s what Wendi does. Her charm, flirtation, and guilelessness (at least the appearance of guilelessness) are put in service to News Corp.’s new China strategy: partnerships. Indeed, Wendi and James, before the Internet bubble blows, become on News Corp.’s behalf, among the largest investors in China’s Internet business. Likewise, News steps back from its historic need to control and becomes an investor in backing other entrepreneurs. Rupert, for fifty years, has gone it alone, whereas Wendi meets people and collects them and introduces them and assembles a very un-News-like mutual admiration society.

In fact, the late 1990s are a relatively down moment for News Corp., as Internet mania is in full swing and News doesn’t have a play. It’s a small irony. The Internet business arguably gets going in the first place—becomes the focus of big media—because of Murdoch. In 1993, one of Murdoch’s longtime retainers, John Evans, a former classified ad salesman at the
Village Voice
who has developed a quirky interest in technology, gets Murdoch to buy a Massachusetts company called Delphi, which is the first and, at the time, only national Internet provider—a concept that Murdoch, rest assured, does not grasp. Nevertheless, if Rupert is buying “the Net” (in 1993 parlance), then everybody else in the media business better damn well be buying it too. Murdoch’s Delphi buy is essentially the first big investment in the Internet by any major media company. But within the year it’s floundering—not least of all because he’s put Jaan Torv, Anna’s brother—“the idiot brother-in-law,” as he was known semiofficially around News—in charge. It is Delphi that, in 1995, is rolled into the brief, and much heralded, joint venture with MCI called iGuide, which shuts down a month later. The truth is, Murdoch has little patience with computers—they bore him.

By the end of the decade, and at the height of the greatest boom in the communications business and the evidence that the media world is about to be massively transformed, Murdoch, or the Murdoch vision, is looking pretty worn.

In the first days of 2000, the business world is rocked by Time Warner’s radical Internet strategy—its merger with AOL. News Corp.’s Internet strategy is, for what it’s worth, Wendi and James. Which, by whatever dumb luck, turns out to be—considering the fate of AOL Time Warner—a reasonable strategy.

Wendi, personifying both China and the Internet at News, is riding very high. Obnoxiously and presumptuously high, in a lot of people’s minds. Then, in March 2000, just as the Internet bubble is about to burst and everything’s about to change, she gets a phone call from Rupert. He says how very important it is that she not tell anyone this: He has just gotten back from the doctor and he has prostate cancer. No one must know, not even his family. Wendi doesn’t quite understand what prostate cancer is. The only other person outside of his doctors who knows he’s sick is his friend and longtime financier Michael Milken, who got prostate cancer in the early nineties and who’s since invested a fortune in research on and treatment of the disease. Milken, at Rupert’s request, ends up explaining it to Wendi.

Suddenly there’s a series of assumed names and furtive appointments. And then, in April, after a visit to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, there’s a leak and News Corp. has to rush out an announcement, which sends the share price down; News’ market cap plummets $10 billion. Murdoch also has to deal with frantic phone calls from his children, whom he has not told about the cancer.

Milken takes over the supervision of the treatment. In fact, it shortly becomes a support group of businessmen of high rank who have survived their prostate cancer bouts—Italian media mogul (and once and future Italian prime minister) Silvio Berlusconi and Intel’s Andy Grove among them—offering advice.

Two weeks later, New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani is diagnosed with prostate cancer too. Murdoch feels he’s suddenly in strong company. He sees the PR issue: The fight is as much against the appearance of mortality as against mortality itself. The game changes if they think you’re mortal.

His reaction to the treatment is dogged and competitive. Exhausted though he might be, he’s got to keep going, show strength, willpower, normalcy—that’s his prescription. He sees himself in something close to presidential terms. The eyes of the world are upon him, trying to judge his weakness. Not just will he or won’t he make it, but by what measure has he been diminished? He becomes oddly bluff about the disease. “Never felt better,” he says, punching the air. The program is not to miss a day of work, stay tanned, and make a series of bold, forward-looking statements. In fact, it’s in this period that he becomes, or says he’s become, a true Internet believer.

Wendi, however, is isolated, confused, depressed. She is, also, at thirty, confronted with the question of children, which they’ve managed to never explicitly discuss before. It is far from clear to her whether she wants to be a business figure herself, the Murdoch who will take over China, or to step back and be a mother. The option, she glumly tells people, is “in the fridge.” “Before, we hadn’t thought about when, but after that happen, we say, if I want to have children, we have to do this,” she will later tell me.

John Lippman’s
Journal
story about Wendi’s ignoble climb happens to appear just as she is having IVF treatment.

In some sense it turns out to be the boldest statement of his recovery and renewal: Nine months after his diagnosis, in February 2001, the announcement is made that Wendi is pregnant. Murdoch, at seventy, is having his fifth child. (The daughter of Wendi’s IVF nurse gets a job at the
New York Post
.)

The simple message is about life, confidence, seizing the day, a man still in his prime. A certain generosity on the part of other media owners (themselves undoubtedly fearing prostate cancer) buffer him from a there’s-no-fool-like-an-old-fool critique. The questions that are obviously prompted by a man in treatment for prostate cancer having a child are, willfully, not asked. He’s spared public mockery and pity as well as even curiosity.

In one sense, it solves News Corp.’s public problem with Wendi too—she’s no longer taking over the world; she’s going to be a mom.

It changes the game in another unintended way. There is, after the announcement of the prostate cancer, a moment at News Corp. when people feel they can talk about succession. There’s a deliberate effort to position Chernin out front. The line about Lachlan taking over is suddenly revised (with almost a clearing of the throat) to say,
Well, of course, until the appropriate day, Peter would be in charge
. Chernin is positioned as the regent. It’s a nice piece of corporate legerdemain, but, nevertheless, for Chernin, the never-to-rise-above-number-two, it’s a virtual promotion. Murdoch, however, recognizes the costs. For the first time, at News Corp., there’s a successor. Except that, after he finishes his radiation, gets a clean bill of health, and produces in quick succession two children, he believes, as much as ever—more!—he’s immortal.

The life he emerges into is the result, most of all, of Wendi’s role change—she reinvents herself as an extraordinary wife. Superachieving yuppie wife. The brand-manager wife of Brand Rupert Murdoch.

As she will put it to me, “I quit work to work at home. To care for Rupert, slaving, don’t get paid. Construction, chef, and cooking and housecleaning!”

In the space of seven years, she will have two children, redecorate (on a grand scale) seven homes, and entirely revamp her husband’s social life—in the process meeting everyone it is useful to meet in the world.

It’s not just that she is a celebrity hound—that’s actually the wrong emphasis. What she has is a remarkable capacity to keep all the working characters in her head at the same time—and most of the characters turn out to be celebrities. And while they may be celebrities, she levels them—partly out of guilelessness, and particularly because there are so many of them (if you have access to all the world’s celebrated people, they quickly become less than they seem), and partly because she somehow finds herself as the ultimate celebrity. Everybody wants to know Wendi—because she’s Murdoch’s wife, but, in addition, because her own story is so fantastic and unlikely.

The interlocking circles that she finds herself in the center of include the haute monde of Hollywood, the new figures in the technology business, the business elite of China, international heads of state, and the wife of every important person everywhere—she is the CEO of the worldwide famous husbands’ wives club—as well as anybody who is anybody at News Corp. (She has a much quicker recall of who’s who at News than Murdoch does.)