The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch

by Michael Wolff

  There are the Chandlers, with the Los Angeles Times, whose Times Mirror Company was the most profitable newspaper company in the United States—but the Chandler family, by the fourth generation, was attenuated and remote from the business, which was sold in 2000 to the Tribune Company (the Chandler trusts, which became significant holders of Tribune Company stock, forced the underperforming company to put itself on the block in 2007—yet another signal to Dow Jones).

  There are the Binghams of Tennessee, who owned Louisville’s Courier-Journal and the Times and whose family saga of good intentions coupled with incompetence and breakdown (and left-wing children) makes Murdoch cringe. There are the Ridders, who turned Knight-Ridder into the second-largest newspaper chain in the country—but earlier in 2006 Tony Ridder was forced by his disgruntled shareholders to sell. There are the families that have stayed private: the Hearsts and the Newhouses and the Coxes. The Hearsts, descendants of the greatest, or at least most iconic, newspaper proprietor of all time, William Randolph Hearst, are disengaged and passive figures, supported by a company that includes television and magazines as well as newspapers, run by professional managers. (Hearst himself made it clear in his will that he didn’t want his not necessarily so bright offspring running the business.) The Newhouse brothers—S.I. and Donald, who inherited their company from their father and who are even older than Murdoch—continue to run their newspapers and magazines with great canniness. Murdoch admires them—and once tried to get them to help him buy Twentieth Century Fox—as much as they admire him. (He wonders, though, what might happen to that company going forward; there’ll be a lot of Newhouse hands out.) The Coxes of Atlanta, descendants of James Middleton Cox, the Democratic candidate for president in 1920 (his daughter, Anne Cox Chambers, was Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to Belgium, and is among the most powerful people in Atlanta), with their Cox Enterprises continue to own newspapers and cable stations as well as the third-largest cable provider in the United States.

  The thing you have to understand—and understanding this explains so much about Murdoch’s success—is that happy newspaper families are alike, and unhappy newspaper families are…well, they’re quite alike too: In the end, they all lose their papers. As cautionary tales go, you could hardly find a more hothouse example of families gone awry, of genetic dumbing down, of the effect of idiot-son primogeniture, and of the despairing results of idle hands than newspaper families. Newspaper families provide no surer way to produce incompetence and ineffective executives, no better guarantee of shareholder antagonism.

  This is his opportunity: The Bancrofts are ridiculous.

  A side benefit of his close look at the Bancrofts is to make him feel so much better about the dysfunction in his own family (dysfunction is a modish word that irritates him—he uses it only because his children say it so often). The Murdochs, who have had their problems, are not, he is confident, heading in the Bancrofts’ direction—not yet. The situation with his children was bad after the divorce, and it got much worse after the introduction of Wendi, followed by the birth of his young children—there were several anni horribili—but they have all managed to persevere. Lachlan’s break from the company, painful as it was, actually helped things.

  Anyway, whatever he did, and whatever Anna might say about his absenteeism—and Homeric it could be—he has done something right. Or Anna has done something right. Or good genes are just good genes.

  PRUE

  Prue, Murdoch’s daughter with his first wife, Patricia Booker, is the only one of his children not directly competing for his business affections. But her husband, Alasdair MacLeod, after a News Corp. stint in London, took a high-ranking spot in Australia in 2004, so Prue is hardly neutral in the News Corp. sweepstakes. What’s more, her children, James, born in 1991, Angus, born in 1993, and Clementine, born in 1996, are the oldest grandchildren, which strategically positions them in the dynastic stream.

  Then again, Prue has morphed into the official family wing nut. She gets away with saying what the others won’t, even things that the others won’t think, and she takes the various family members much less seriously than they do themselves. This involves, not least of all, seeing her three oldest half siblings as, each in their way, master-race prototypes. Where Prue is short, plump, unfashionable, and rather disheveled, her half siblings are each striking, precise, intense—almost too good to be true, at least at first glance. Indeed, both her brothers married models, each of whom bears an uncomfortable resemblance to their husbands’ mother, Anna—striking, precise, intense—and hence to their husbands’ sister Elisabeth, who is her mother’s clone.

  Prue’s mother, Patricia, whom Murdoch met and married in Adelaide, was always regarded by Murdoch’s mother as less than she should have been. When he divorced her, in 1966, she married a bad-news Swiss jet-setter by the name of Freddie Maeder, with whom she began a partying life (funded with her former husband’s money), often leaving Prue behind.

  When Rupert and Anna Torv marry in 1967 (she is not on the face of it a much better match—an Estonian Catholic is not exactly a catch in Anglo-Protestant-centric Melbourne), nine-year-old Prue begs to live with them. They move together to London in 1968. Prue is the difficult stepchild to a pregnant stepmother—and it’s all pretty much downhill from there. Her schooling is a disaster (Murdoch, trying to be an Australian egalitarian, first sends Prue to a London state school—she doesn’t last a term), her behavior often incorrigible, and her relationship with her stepmother at the very least strained and often much worse. Then there’s the move to New York—she’s fifteen and suddenly plunged into the Manhattan private school world at Dalton. She’s way out of her element among the New York rich kids. She’s one of the few Dalton students who don’t go on to college. Murdoch, at this point, still doesn’t see girls as having much of anything to do with what he does, certainly not as part of the future of News Corp. In fact, the only job Prue gets at News Corp. is a girl’s job—when she returns to London, she’s briefly a researcher at News of the World’s Sunday magazine.

  At twenty-six, she makes what seems to be a favorable marriage to Crispin Odey, who will go on to be the highest-earning hedge fund manager in London. But a year later, they separate. Prue goes back to Australia—partly because her mother is in bad shape, in the midst of the depressions she will go in and out of after Freddie squanders the fortune Murdoch gave her on a failed orange juice company in Spain. At one point, Rupert and Prudence actually go to Spain together to retrieve Booker after she suffers a breakdown there. (Murdoch paid for her medical care and to set her up again in Adelaide before she died in 1998.)

  In 1989, Prue, back in London, meets and marries Alasdair MacLeod, a Scotsman who shortly goes to work for Murdoch. Prue is strongly against Alasdair going into the family business—but Murdoch offers him a job behind Prue’s back.

  Her resentments and general feeling of exclusion from the family continue and come to a head in 1999 when she is plastered on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald under the headline “Forgotten Daughter.” Still furious about remarks her father made at a press conference in 1997 in which he’d referred to “my three children,” Prue agreed to sit for the only interview she’d ever given up to that point. In the interview she recounted how, after her father’s public slight, she had had “the biggest row I’ve ever had with my father. I rang up, I screamed at him, I hung up. He was very upset. He then sent the biggest bunch of flowers—it was bigger than a sofa—and two clementine trees.”

  The interview appears the day of Lachlan’s wedding to Australian supermodel Sarah O’Hare. But Prue, who hasn’t seen the interview, arrives at Cavan—the 40,000-acre sheep station outside of Canberra Murdoch bought in the 1960s—for the wedding and can’t understand why everyone is so tense.

  It must be “your fault,” she says to her father, telling him it has to do with the separation.

  “It has nothing to do with me,” Murdoch says. “It’s your fault.”

  “You’ve got Wendi h
oled up in a hotel in Sydney, and you’ve got Anna here hating you. Why is it my fault?”

  “Did you not see the front page? You’ve upset them all.”

  And yet she is in some ways the child Murdoch is most comfortable with—or at least the child who is least afraid of him. Within News Ltd., in Australia, people remark that she treats her father more like a husband—an irritating husband she has to beat some sense into.

  For her part, she finds it just slightly unsettling that he regularly mistakes her for one of his sisters.

  Prue is the only ally he has when Wendi comes into the picture (still, she tells an Australian documentary filmmaker, he was a “dirty old man”). And indeed, during the divorce negotiations with Anna, who is trying to guarantee that neither his new wife nor possible new children would gain an interest in News Corp., Anna tries to assign Prue a lesser position in the family trust.

  ELISABETH

  Murdoch’s ideas about girls seem to change substantially with Elisabeth, born ten years after Prue. This is partly about the broad cultural change that’s happening as Elisabeth is growing up. But it’s also that Elisabeth is growing up in New York—a particular age in New York when so much of the focus, especially in the circles she and her family move in, is on the success, achievement, advantages, and connections of the children as well as the parent.

  Elisabeth goes to The Brearley School, where Murdoch is hardly the only billionaire father and where Elisabeth is not even the most notable heiress.

  It’s a hothouse of competition—academic and social and, not least of all, for ultimate worldly position.

  He begins raising her with an idea of how he was raised. When Elisabeth is in the ninth grade, he sends her to Geelong Grammar, the same school his parents sent him to that he hated. It isn’t any better an experience for Elisabeth. She’s back within a year.

  She is often uncontrollable—including a suspension from school for drinking. She fights more with her strict, formal mother than with him. Away so often, he’s the good guy.

  He doesn’t actually want to know what she’s up to. He’s careful not to know.

  Petronella Wyatt, the daughter of his friend Woodrow Wyatt, has Liz, in her memory of a teenage summer trip, climbing on the back of a Vespa and roaring off with an Italian man who chatted them up in a Roman bar.

  She goes to Vassar College from Brearley. In her senior year, she falls in love with Elkin Kwesi Pianim, the son of a Ghanaian political prisoner. Murdoch sends Elisabeth to work for News in Australia after she graduates—not without thinking the distance might end her relationship with Elkin. But she wants to come back. In September 1993 she marries Elkin in a huge Catholic wedding in Los Angeles. Elkin, of course, goes to work for Fox.

  But Elisabeth remains restless. She convinces her father to help her do something on her own. He suggests that television stations are a good bet. The following February, weeks away from having her first baby, Cornelia, with a loan from Australia’s Commonwealth Bank facilitated by her father, she and Elkin buy two small NBC affiliates in California for $35 million. She’s a harridan of a manager—ripping through the staff, sacking many old stalwarts, and slashing operating costs. Eighteen months later, she and Elkin sell the stations for a $12 million profit.

  She gets into Stanford Business School, but her father says he can teach her much more than she could learn in any old MBA program. “I called my dad and said, ‘I’ve gotten into Stanford and I’m going.’ He said, ‘Are you fucking crazy? No, you are not. I can give you a much better MBA of life than anybody at Stanford can give you, you know. Come work for me.’” She joins BSkyB, based in London, in 1996, reporting directly to the CEO, Sam Chisholm, then promptly becomes pregnant with her second child. She also becomes a high-profile figure in the London media social scene. Meanwhile, Elkin, who is running the couple’s small venture capital company, Idaho Partners, along with his brother Nicholas Pianim, launches an upmarket Afro-Caribbean weekly and buys the sponsorship rights for London’s annual Afro-Caribbean Hair and Beauty Exhibition. He also tries to launch a television station specifically for black audiences.

  At Sky, she clashes publicly with Chisholm, who refers to her openly as a “management trainee.” Murdoch, in this instance, chooses his child over his manager, and in 1997 Chisholm resigns. But Murdoch, annoyed by Elisabeth’s failure to get along with Chisholm, her latest pregnancy, with her second daughter, Anna, and the increasingly critical reports of her London life, doesn’t give her the top job. Elisabeth “has some things to work out,” he tells Mathew Horsman, a reporter from the Guardian. “She has to decide how many kids she is going to have, where she wants to live.” He adds of his children, “Currently it is their consensus that Lachlan will take over. He will be the first among equals, but they will all have to prove themselves first.”

  Elisabeth starts working with Matthew Freud, great-grandson of Sigmund and the most notorious PR man in London, on a rebranding campaign for Sky—and, not incidentally, on an effort to improve her profile in the press. Their affair shortly becomes public.

  Disappointed by Lachlan’s ascendancy within the company, and taking her mother’s side in the marital battle with her father, and once again pregnant—by Freud—Elisabeth resigns from Sky in May 2000, saying that she plans to start an independent production company.

  The tabloids revel in details about her on-again off-again relationship with Freud and her breakup with Elkin. Freud even briefly walks out on her when their daughter Charlotte, born in November 2000, is three months old. Over both of her parents’ objections, she marries Freud in the British wedding of the year at his family’s country home in August 2001.

  Although she has publicly said that she will be primarily a passive investor in Shine, the independent production company she is backing, and that she intends to spend more time with her children, by the time her father is thinking about buying the Wall Street Journal she’s running the biggest independent television production company in the United Kingdom.

  Two months before he bids for the Journal, she will finally give birth to a boy, Samson Murdoch Freud.

  LACHLAN

  He’s the first son, which has a profound pull on Murdoch. It also may be that frictionless, affable, constant Lachlan is easy to get along with. Uncomplicated. This is what makes him, in the eyes of the many Murdoch-philes, not Murdoch enough. Curiously, though, it makes him more Australian, which has become his adopted, or in a sense reclaimed, home.

  Within a few months of his abrupt and emotional leave-taking from News in 2005, he and his wife, Sarah, have not just settled into Sydney but have become pop culture figures—he as famous in Australia as Prince William in England, and she the head of the major Murdoch charity, and in 2007, the fetching hostess of a popular morning show. They’re the king and queen of Bronte Beach. Australia is his place.

  He was born in London in 1971 but grew up in New York. It was a wholly upper-class, establishment—liberal Eastern establishment, to be sure—American upbringing. Dalton and Trinity in Manhattan. Then Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Then Princeton.

  After Princeton, Lachlan spends a couple of months at News Corp.’s Sydney headquarters as a management trainee before it’s announced in August 1994 that he will become the general manager of Queensland Newspapers, the Brisbane-based publisher of the Courier Mail. This is, remember, the newspaper that the Herald and Weekly Times trustees convinced Dame Elisabeth to sell to the company after Keith Murdoch’s death. So at twenty-two—the same age at which his father took over the Adelaide News—Lachlan takes his management role. (Not incidentally, in the rival Packer dynasty, Jamie Packer, who is four years older than Lachlan, has begun to take over duties from his father.) Three years later—Lachlan’s preternatural good looks, signature tattoos, motorcycle, and famous name having made him an iconic Aussie—he’s promoted to running all of News Corp. in Australia.

  That year, 1997, the Murdoch children are summoned to New York, where Rupert tells them
that he’s settled the issue of succession and that Lachlan will end up running the company.

  In 1999, Lachlan marries Sarah O’Hare—all of the Murdoch children get married young—who is the face (or bottom, actually) of Bonds, the most famous Australian underwear brand. The wedding at Cavan, at which Prue blows up at her father, is front-page news in Australia—the romance of the year, an Australian fairy tale. At Anna’s request, Wendi Deng isn’t invited and waits in a hotel room in Sydney.

  Lachlan is a constant newsroom presence in Australia, carefully modeling himself, just as his father had done decades before, as the boy publisher. Among his closest friends in the company is Col Allan, the boozing, bad-tempered editor of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, whom Lachlan later appoints as editor of the New York Post.

  In 1999, his father brings him back to New York as the head of U.S. publishing and then eighteen months later gives him the title of deputy chief operating officer—officially the number three guy at News Corp.

  But, other than the Post, he has no real job—he’s resisted everywhere else at News Corp. in the United States. It’s a lesson that his brother and sister both take keen note of: Being too close to their father, and the people who want to be close to him, isn’t a propitious move. Quite the opposite: To be at a distance, at a far remove from the old man, makes them the Murdochs everybody who is also distant from the old man wants to get close to.

  Officially, Lachlan will say he’s moving to Australia to give his sons, Kalan, born in 2004, and Aidan, born in 2006, a better life.

  JAMES

  Unlike Lachlan, James is like his father, News Corp. people believe. Or at least he tries to be. But it may not be so much his father that he’s emulating as some generic idea of the advanced business figure. In open-necked white dress shirt and steel-rimmed glasses, he’s aggressive, implacable, focused, remote, fit, precise. His father is obviously proud, even perhaps slightly afraid of him, but, one might suspect, a little confused by him too.