The Man Who Owns the News (6 page)

Both of the troubling events that occur at the end of this year involve Murdoch’s family, which is the central governing principle of News Corp. Fostering the well-being, power, and present and future opportunities of the Murdoch family, in its multiple iterations, is, after only Rupert’s interests (which he judges—for the most part anyway—as part and parcel of his family’s interests), the reason for the company’s existence. Inside News Corp., you treat the Murdochs like they are the royal family—or the way the British royal family was regarded before Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids came along and destroyed their mystique.

Murdoch sees himself, and hence everybody at News Corp. sees him, as first and foremost a good family man—even if he has three of them.

There is the early, left-behind family: former wife Patricia Booker, whom he continued to support through her many travails after their divorce until her death in 1998, and their daughter, Prudence, born in 1958, who moved in with her father when she was nine. Then there’s the dominant middle family: former wife Anna, to whom he was married for thirty-two years, with their daughter, Elisabeth, born in 1968, son Lachlan three years later, and son James fourteen months after that. And now the new family: wife Wendi and daughters Grace, born in 2001, and Chloe, born in 2003. There is also his centenarian mother. And then his three sisters and their families and their various involvements with News Corp. Murdoch, the most famous lone gun in the age of business lone guns, is an extremely encumbered one.

This can be difficult for the executives closest to him. They are often caught between their responsibility to keep the greater Murdoch family happy and his not-infrequent tendency to make his family quite unhappy.

The consternation he is causing in late 2004 is related to what is perhaps the most confounding and dramatic moment in the history of News Corp. and of the Murdoch family: the fact that, against all indications, character, and personal beliefs, one day in 1998 he upped and left his wife for a woman thirty-eight years his junior—Wendi Deng, from Shandong Province in China. Within every other company, indeed with regard to every other powerful man, this surely would have been treated for what it was, a leveling human weakness, or even great comedy. At News Corp., his breakup and remarriage were treated with a level of sensitivity, graciousness, and respect as hardly exists in human nature and certainly does not exist on the gossip pages of his own newspapers. Indeed, several of his closest executives shortly followed suit and left their wives.

Although there is nothing stylish about him, nothing young (except his wife), nothing particularly lifestyle-oriented about his lifestyle, he had, after the breakup, curiously moved to SoHo, Manhattan’s most chic-ishly aspirational neighborhood. His sons, Lachlan and James, both exceedingly fashionable, lived nearby.

But as peculiar as downtown Rupert is, it is not nearly so jarring and out of character as what he does next: impulsively agreeing to pay $44 million for the most expensive apartment in New York.

To his executives, this is
not
Rupert Murdoch, and certainly for his adult children, it is
not
their father.

Rupert Murdoch doesn’t show off. What you see is what you get. He is an old man, with a crevassed face, in inauspicious suits, with an ever-present singlet under his white shirt. He might be worth $10 billion, give or take, but the money has never been the thing.

His wife, Wendi, as she will tell me in an interview in 2007—as she was finishing decorating the apartment—finds his tightness particularly laughable and, in a sense, endearing. “His whole family like this. They so cheap. When he ordered the boat”—the 183-foot sailboat
Rosehearty
—“he worried,” she will relate in a Chinese accent as pronounced as his Australian one, “people think it’s too extravagant, too much money. I said, ‘Rupert, don’t worry. All our friends like Tom Perkins or David Geffen, they have like this huge ship. I don’t think you’re extravagant. Your boat is not as spectacular.’”

His penuriousness, his aversion to pretense, his disdain for grandness or affectation or—his worst, most damning word—elitism, is the DNA of his company.

But in a real-estate-mad city, it is hard not to give the most expensive apartment pretty glaring meaning. Real estate is the art of the obvious. Real estate defines the man. Murdoch
is
surely saying something pretty unsubtle and, it would seem, against his very nature.

He might in fact be more appealing and less threatening as a slightly foolish rich man. If on one end of the rich scale there is Donald Trump, all mouth and affect, calling attention to himself, on the other end is Rupert Murdoch, shadowy and scowling, all head and no affect, his personality largely hidden from view. We actually seem, counterintuitively, to like it when the rich buy what they want—it brings them down to size, their needs. But it is hard to fit Murdoch into this ordinary and fallible role. Even though he is among the most gilded men in a gilded age, he is not characteristically associated with stuff, with the personal symbols of wealth—the houses, the boats, the planes. He has them (as many as seven homes—in Los Angeles; London; Beijing; Canberra, Australia; Carmel, California; Long Island; as well as Manhattan) but, partly because he works all the time (with an OCD level of attention), and partly because he comes across as rather less than human—ruthless as well as remote—the normal human pleasures and pride of being rich don’t seem to define him or leaven him. He’s Nixonian in that sense—enjoyment does not seem to be a priority. He is just so clearly more interested in power than in things. He understands that the symbols of power—and this is not something necessarily so well understood by the rich and powerful—aren’t power; they are distractions.

What’s more, he always seems to be on the run. Disconnected, physically as well as emotionally. Everywhere but nowhere. Not part of anything. Just a man with a phone. He seems abstract, dis-embodied, puzzling. Not like you and me. Not susceptible to the ego enhancements we’d be susceptible to. When his second marriage ended, nobody, but
nobody,
thought there might be another woman.

The most logical reason for a rich man to break up his longtime marriage was not even considered—not even by the great gossips and analysts who closely follow him (and a divorce when you’re one of the richest men in the world—a resident, at that time, of California, a community property state—is followed very closely). He is just too remote, unfeeling, preoccupied, old (he is a man who seems permanently old—his singlet is his symbol).

Unlike so many of his peers, he has never become a familiar part of the social comedy. The media, for one, has not brought him down to size because he owns it—or owns enough of it to effectively inhibit its natural derisiveness. His public relations man of thirty years, Howard Rubenstein, even negotiated a truce with the other New York tabloid, Mortimer Zuckerman’s
Daily News:
Neither man’s paper will truck in the other’s personal life.

Indeed, the hatred that people bear him and the fear they have of him have much to do with the sense that he has no weakness, no vanity, no need. He does not need to be liked—does not, it seems, even like to be liked.

And yet here he is, wanting something so transparent, so human. Why would he want to start showing off at his age? Preening. Making a lifestyle statement.

Oddly, Murdoch has lived here in this exact same building once before (though in a much less imperial apartment—one that cost $350,000 in the 1970s), with his second wife, Anna, steely and gracious, who had been nicely attuned to the world’s grandest neighborhood. Now Murdoch is moving back into the building with Wendi. He is being reborn as nouveau riche.

The once-and-future-wife aspects of the dwelling (in all of these buildings you have
ancien régime
neighbors and great attentive staffs with vast historical memories) have to be figured into his statement. Either the current wife wants what the former wife was entitled to and Murdoch is giving it to her, or Murdoch himself wants to show that he is powerful enough not to have to go down a separate tangent, live
downtown,
just because he has a new wife.

He noticed it first in the
New York Times:
Laurance Rockefeller had kicked the bucket. It’s that old New York truism—the way to find an apartment is to read the obituaries. He’d glimpsed the place once. When he lived here with Anna, in a duplex, he went to a building meeting in the Rockefeller triplex. Seeing that Laurance was dead and gone, that the place might be available, he started calling everybody he knew so he could be the first one to make an offer when it came on the market. He had Dick Parsons, then the CEO of Time Warner and a former banker, write a letter to David Rockefeller, the former head of Chase Manhattan Bank and one of the grandest of the city’s grandees as well as the late Laurance’s brother.

Overlooking the zoo in Central Park, it is, at eight thousand square feet, with twenty rooms and four terraces and eleven and a half bathrooms over three floors, an “incomparably imperial apartment,” as the
New York Observer,
the preeminent chronicler of the city’s imperial apartments, gushes.

Except Wendi, for one, hardly thinks so.

“We go there, the walls are falling apart,” she’ll tell me. “It’s very WASPy. I didn’t understand. It’s not me. There was a hole in the floor…Awful. I think they live there all their lives. They hadn’t done anything for forty-five years. Everything is falling apart. The art was fantastic. I said to Rupert, ‘Isn’t that a great Monet?’ But we didn’t buy those. They’re gone and the carpet is old.”

Other than the view over Central Park, she finds it hard to make sense of the threadbare and dowdy place—especially at $44 million. She says to Rupert that they’ll have to tear the whole thing down—and he says no way! And she says, well, negotiate, definitely don’t agree to the asking price. But he tells her to let him handle it—and immediately offers the whole $44 million.

By now, his family is used to (if also slightly embarrassed by) his not very convincing efforts to be young. The hair dyed obviously and vainly orange—or, occasionally, aubergine—the same color used by Sumner Redstone and Donald Trump (they seem too proud to go out and get an expensive dye job, but too vain not to have a dye job at all). And his exercise regimen and his new diets. And, of course, the new children.

But his family—new and old—worries that the $44 million apartment doesn’t seem like him trying to be young; it seems more like trying to do something, make a statement, before it’s too late. To say forget the Rockefellers—he is the man of the moment. The man who sits on top of the city, which is arguably true, but so unlike him to say. To have what he wants while he can still get it.

His executives, not at all used to having to deal with issues of Murdoch’s self, or identity, or vanity, retreat into the customary safety of assuming that he knows absolutely what he’s doing. Hence, after a day or two of exchanging puzzled and worried looks and dealing with the press (ultimately, the most difficult press inquiry is about who is going to pay the $50,000 a month for the temporary place while the new one is being renovated—Murdoch doesn’t understand, at least not until the PR people and accountants explain otherwise, why the company shouldn’t be paying the tab), they merely treat the new apartment with the same tact and gravitas with which they treated his remarriage.

His older children—curious, to say the very least, on edge, really, sometimes in a cold fury, or cold sweat, about
their
place in the Murdoch world—are holding their breath while they wait to find out what it means that their cheapskate father, suspicious of most airs and vanities, now clearly seems to want people to know he has arrived.

What does it mean? Is this a final statement? Some biological urge to make physical his presence before it’s too late? A valedictory piece of real estate?

And then there is a second distressing event, occurring also at the end of 2004: Murdoch makes a mistake. The man who never takes his eye off the ball takes his eye off the ball. And in doing so, possibly imperils just about everything—his leadership of the company as well as his family’s future hold on it.

In a move that the company’s bankers and its CFO, Dave DeVoe, think will help raise the price of News Corp. shares, the company, after long debate, decides to formally transform itself from an Australian company to an American one, and to transfer from the Australian Stock Exchange to the New York Stock Exchange. When that happens—and News Corp. and its bankers are well aware of this—all the News Corp. stock that is held by index funds in Australia (that is, the funds benchmarked to the Australian market) will automatically be put up for sale by their institutional holders. This happens on November 2, Election Day in the United States, which ought to find Murdoch directing the repurchase of his News Corp. shares, but instead finds him flying from L.A. to New York on the phone getting exit numbers that are then showing John Kerry on his way to becoming president. Arriving in New York, Murdoch heads to Fox News. He gets glummer through the evening and has more and more to drink, until, sitting with Roger Ailes in the control room as the raw data comes in, the results begin to turn toward George W. Bush’s reelection and he and Ailes become more and more elated. Murdoch doesn’t go home until 3
A.M
.

This election day also finds John Malone, the great cable television pioneer, longtime Murdoch rival, sometime Murdoch partner, and cold, calculating, disruptive, opportunistic, brilliant son of a bitch, out at his home base in Denver, buying up the News Corp. shares as they come onto the market.