Autumn of the Moguls

by Michael Wolff

  It would never have occurred to Halberstam or anyone else he profiles and mythologizes in his book that the media industry would, over the next generation, become the nation’s largest industry because, in part, it would provide escape from this boring civic world. (People magazine, launched in 1974 by Henry Luce’s company—after Luce died—and which becomes the most successful magazine of all time, surely helps invent the new, alternative, celebritified, noncivic power structure.)

  And yet while Halberstam misses the soon to be inescapable and elemental point about the media business, he nails another fundamental point: The media has suddenly become a really great business. He gets the hunger for media. People are eating this stuff up. It’s totally hot.

  You can’t read The Powers That Be and not start to think, That’s where it’s happening.

  It’s like the West: free land.

  The romance of Halberstam’s world is not only in its cleverness and toughness and even nobility, but also that it’s so easy. Anybody could do this. Anybody could be this kind of success.

  It’s the first structural analysis—who knew this person and who knew that person and how the web of connections and being in the right place at the right time intersected with the nation’s changing education levels, its advancing aspirations and the laws of supply and demand—of a media career. And it’s the first time that the media business is considered as not just the story of newspapers or magazines or television, but in the aggregate, cross-platform sense which makes it all so much, well, bigger.

  Everybody I know of a certain generation in the media business read The Powers That Be and took it ever so seriously. Many of us, I’ll wager, came into the media business, rather than, say, government or academia, because of The Powers That Be.

  5

  THE

  PARTNER

  Heilemann and Battelle had gone into partnership with one of the really deft and canny hotdogs of the post-Halberstam media age.

  He was the senior figure at the Quadrangle investment firm. Before that, he was one among a handful of bankers at the center of the mergers and acquisitions that had remade the media industry.

  But before that, he was a journalist too—which made everything about him all the more surprising and confusing.

  Let me defer to Steven Wolff, my then eight-year-old son, just arriving home from a play date—his first at his new friend Izzy’s house.

  Where I work in our apartment is close enough to the front door to hear my son’s comings and goings. By the end of the day there’s a reluctance and crankiness and heaviness—the backpack thumping, shoes dropping, coat dragging. The nanny cajoling… Just one more step… Just hang your coat up.… Just… Only the most dogged parent would inquire, at this moment, about the day or the play date or the state of the second grade. The kid needs a cocktail before he’s going to be civil. And indeed, Steven almost always heads to the other end of our apartment—to avoid disturbing a father theoretically at work, or, more threatening, a father who might want a sociable chat.

  But something different was going on in the foyer. It was an audible change in the energy level—there was a frantic excitement, everything quicker, louder: the backpack not thumping, but being flung; shoes being kicked. The nanny’s voice rising, control being lost. The chatter level going off the scale, “Izzy this… Izzy that…”

  I almost went out.

  But I know Manhattan play date etiquette. It’s not all right to recruit your children as spies.

  What’s more, children—and Steven has two older sisters who have had countless play dates before him—are not very reliable reporters. They don’t readily perceive real estate or class differences (although this changes with adolescence when they become canny appraisers and breathy gossip columnists). This may be because an eight-year-old, as yet, lacks envy’s power of observation, and it may be too because the differences between upper-middle-class real estate and upper-class real estate is not, in Manhattan, all that great. Most truly grand apartments in Manhattan are four or five thousand square feet, an American professional’s right anywhere else. An overdecorated billionaire’s apartment on the Upper East Side is a doctor’s home in Scarsdale or Shaker Heights. In Manhattan, millions are in the nuances.

  And so, as difficult as it is, and as disappointing as it is, I have learned not to ask too much of my children about other people’s lots in life.

  The nanny was sharply calling Steven now. There was a clattering, and I heard an impermissible flying leap between the arms of two chairs, and then my son was flinging open the French doors which I look out of, over the laptop screen, as I work.

  His eyes were large. His face lit. His shirt askew. It seemed like a vast sugar high, but more profound. Revelatory. It was one of those moments as a parent that you anticipate and dread—when some piece of information, some experience gained on a play date (i.e., the street) takes your child from you. I held my breath for his epiphany.

  “IZZY,” he said, momentously, his voice soaring and eerily distorting, his eyes becoming ever more saucerlike, “IS RICH!”

  I inquired closely and guiltily.

  In the telling, Izzy occupied a Harry Potter apartment. Some fantastic and fabulous interior world.

  Great halls and monumental public rooms.

  A complete Toys Us inventory.

  Marble.

  Columns.

  Statuary.

  A bathroom as big as a whole normal apartment!

  The most delicious cookies ever served anywhere.

  Izzy’s father had gone to work at the New York Times just around the time when I did (for me it was the Watergate—Yom Kippur War—overthrow-of-Salvador Allende fall of 1973).

  Manual typewriters—rows and rows of them on the third floor. Dirty linoleum floors. Rotary dial phones.

  It was a preyuppie age. A prebusiness age. Another world, really.

  I wonder if everyone in their careers finds themselves at some point thinking they are fundamentally from another era—and that they will be found out one embarrassing day.

  Actually, I most wonder if there are people who have never experienced such a temporal break. Are there people whose lives and careers have a logical continuity?

  There are, after all, still people—as though in some parallel world—in the New York Times newsroom. And while the floors are cleaner, and the office equipment up-to-date, they are still doing the same job that we used to do. I know many of these people, but I do not know if they know that, in a manner of speaking, the industrial revolution began and they stayed on the farm.

  But perhaps they do know this, because among the two most irritating words to a generation of Times men are “Steve Rattner”—that is, Izzy’s father.

  During the seven or eight years he was at the Times, Rattner did better than almost anybody else. He was really golden. New York, London, Washington: These were assignments that already put him in a sphere to make him one of the most powerful journalists in the world. His career path was the path of a Reston or Rosenthal or Frankel.

  Now, no one, in that age, even far-lesser achievers, gave up the Times. It was like giving up the Church. You couldn’t replicate the career, you couldn’t improve upon it, you couldn’t substitute for it. Achievement at the Times, just being at the Times, was sui generis achievement.

  Merely reaching the Times, like the priesthood or Harvard, was an accomplishment, and then, as a separate or additional process, you moved up inside the institution.

  The exceptions were people who fell out because of weakness or eccentricity. Or you could in some risky, prodigal endeavor leave the Times to write. This was in some sense like leaving the priesthood for a contemplative order. Or like leaving the priesthood, in South America, to pursue revolutionary activities. But you didn’t and wouldn’t just leave the Times for some canny career reason.

  Just as, one day, Steve Rattner did, upping and going into investment banking.

  Everything argued against this. There was a line
in the sand, deep and meaningful, between the business side and our side.

  If you were one kind of person you couldn’t be the other kind of person.

  These were inimical interests.

  Male. Female.

  And to discuss people who did business was hardly even to discuss people who did investment banking.

  When Izzy’s father decided to leave the Times and become an investment banker, it was hardly clear—certainly hardly clear to virtually all the reporters at the New York Times—what investment banking even was. Or, at least, if it was anything grander than being a stockbroker.

  In 1982, investment banking was still a dumb-dumb business. In the long shadow of the sixties, and the darkness of the no-growth seventies, Wall Street was a redoubt of C-students, and sons of former Wall Streeters (who were C-students).

  So when Izzy’s father made this leap, crossed this chasm, he was seeing something that few other people saw—not just a series of opportunities, but, I think, a new identity.

  There is a way that Rattner is described during his early years at the Times which is telling. First, he is always described. He is singled out. He is perceived as being different. Now this could mean that among highly ambitious people, which lots of people at the Times are (lots too, interestingly, are not ambitious at all—they are, in all aspects, lifers), he is just more ambitious. Or it could mean that his ambition is of a different order. Timesian ambition is very much of a corporate kind. It is Organization Man stuff. It is to rise up within the Times but always with the implicit understanding that without the Times you would be nothing. It’s a very precise individual-to-institution calculation. You are its product—almost never the other way around.

  But there was something different when people talked about Steve Rattner. A further wariness. An additional respect. An uptick of interest. And often, an undercurrent of envy and dislike.

  For his part, Rattner, a short, slight, fair young man, seemed cooler, more remote, more aware than others.

  He began his Times career as James Reston’s assistant—which is something like beginning a legal career as a Supreme Court clerk. Chosen. This was, then, the most honored job for a young man in journalism.

  From Reston’s office he went to the Metro desk and then, in the OPEC-obsessed seventies, to writing about energy and shuttling back and forth to the Middle East, and then, at 24, to the Washington Bureau.

  As it happened, his Washington rotation intersected with that of the publisher’s son, Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

  This circumstance of having the heir working in Washington, as a journalist among other journalists, is played, of course, as a normal one. But everyone knows it’s weird and loaded.

  Now, nobody is at the New York Times by happenstance (whereas most people find themselves working in professions and at companies they couldn’t ever have anticipated—it’s pure randomness). Everybody who is at the Times has aimed for it, considered it for years, fetishized it in greater and lesser ways.

  The Sulzberger family is a complicated part of this fetish. It is one of America’s longest-lasting, and last remaining, instances of primogeniture.

  In any conventional career strategy at the Times, there really isn’t much advantage in having a relationship with the family. It presents more complications than benefits. The line of demarcation is too clear. It’s not just a hierarchical distinction, but a class line. And the family occupies a class of one—you can’t get into it. It would be like someone trying to rise up in Labor Party politics by befriending the Prince of Wales.

  But Steve Rattner does befriend young Arthur (always called young Arthur). Indeed, young Arthur is befriended by an assortment of people in the Washington Bureau in the early eighties. That is young Arthur’s job at this point in time: to experience the Times as its reporters experience it—and to experience Times reporters.

  But it’s situational. While he befriends these people now, he will unbefriend them as the situation changes. He will say later, in his surprising blunt-speak way, that he can’t be friends with Times reporters. That it doesn’t work. That it complicates things.

  But the person he will stay friends with, best friends (they will later live in the same building in New York and, every morning, go to the gym together) is Izzy’s father—no longer at the Times, but now an investment banker, a media money guy, whose clients include the Sulzbergers.

  I remember when I heard this: Steve Rattner had left the Times to go to Wall Street.

  It was unclear what this meant, and yet it was clear to me that it was large—disturbing. If no one had ever done this, but someone, someone like Steve Rattner, was doing it now, what did it mean?

  But I wasn’t that far from understanding.

  When I had arrived at the Times, I’d known, within something like minutes, that it was all wrong.

  It was Gothic. Dickensian. It did not look like the modern world. It lacked any feeling of affluence. It was dirty and gray and unfriendly. The men had tics and limps and hairpieces.

  You could romanticize this—this was a newsroom, after all. And that’s what lots of affluent, suburban college boys must have done.

  But I couldn’t shake the sense that this was a time warp, which, if you didn’t run fast, would catch you.

  I sensed the grip of the place. The plantation quality. Still, I did not think that the career itself, the economic proposition, was flawed: to be a journalist. A writer in the culturally important person sense. A writer in the pre-rock-star sense. A writer in the sense of there being a recognized profession.

  I left the Times, as Steve Rattner was moving up in the ranks, to enter what might fairly be called the late renaissance of the magazine business. These were terrible economic years, but in fact, there were plenty of alternatives to the Times in New York. It was (it borders on the bizarre to remember) a time of thriving, independent, Zeitgeisty magazines.

  New York magazine, started in 1968, was a vast success. Rolling Stone moved to New York from San Francisco in 1977. New Times, a biweekly alternative newsmagazine, where I went to work, was started by former Time Inc.-ers. Mort Zuckerman bought the Atlantic with great fanfare. Harper’s was not that far removed from the era of Willie Morris (the great editor of his generation). Even Condé Nast, then just a rag-trade publisher, wanted in on the game, and launched a revival of Vanity Fair. Manhattan, inc., and Spy would shortly come onto the scene.

  And yet, if you had a truly special sensitivity you might have recognized that there were roiling waters. You could have read these magazines themselves—so many of them doomed—and learned everything you had to know: The rise of Hollywood and the value of celebrities and the rise of a business culture full of its own Zeitgeisty cowboy personalities, which, every day, was setting a new baseline of what represented real and attainable wealth, was changing everything.

  I was trying to make my writerly way when I heard that Steve Rattner was leaving the Times to go into investment banking.

  How did he know, I have spent a lot of time wondering since then, that everything was about to change?

  In hindsight, the business explanation is clear: One result of the late-seventies fiscal crisis in New York was that the financial industry and the power of finance, public and private, expanded vastly. Then too, there was the Reagan era of deregulation, an end to inflation, massive deficit spending, and the bulge of baby boomers in their prime earning years.

  But this still does not explain the scale of the transformation, neither the economic nor the cultural transformation: Virtually everything became a reflection of how it was financed.

  6

  MY

  THEORY

  Corporate America, heretofore, was a white-bread, repressed, deeply uncool place to be—but then, all of a sudden, corporate man became a sexy thing.

  My own favorite theory for what caused business to become such a compelling sport and transforming experience was the advent of the spreadsheet. This came in ’82 or ’83, shortly after the intro
duction and widespread adoption of the IBM PC: first VisiCalc, then Lotus 1-2-3, and then, of course, Excel. If you could work a spreadsheet, money suddenly became a highly fluid concept—the buck never stopped anywhere (oddly, during the eighties, bottom line became a metaphor for something absolute and irreducible when, in fact, the bottom line was becoming ever more elusive).

  Financial strategy became like a war game. If you played it one way, you risked the end of the world, but if you changed a variable, you were safe and secure. Business reality became wonderfully plastic (running numbers has about the same relationship to actual business as sex fantasies do to sex—indeed, running numbers gets to be a sort of fetish).

  Financial engineering (the term of art for the business that grew up around working a spreadsheet) becomes as complex as any activity becomes when you increase the variables exponentially. “Can he keep track of the moving pieces?” was what got asked about prospective managers of high-flying companies. The question was not, “Can he work hard and focus on the many details of the business?” Rather it was, “Can he appreciate that business has become a Rube Goldberg system of effects and countereffects, of balancing one representation against its counterrepresentation (what the Street is told versus what the media is told versus what the employees are told), of keeping not two sets of books but as many sets as can be imagined (the spreadsheet accommodates all fantasies)?”

  In short order, business became way too complex for mere businessmen—the pallid, gray dad types of the past. Business suddenly demanded a different caliber of brainpower and temperament.

  Everybody was catching the spirit. There was a revolutionary quality to what was going on—the old order was being swept away (indeed, almost everybody from the prior business generation was exiled).

  Every day it was happening: Absolute nobodies, with only heart and imagination—and strange new ideas about how to analyze and manipulate numbers—took over heretofore unassailable, invulnerable, and oppressively dreary great American corporations. It was a class overthrow: outsiders against insiders, smarties against dopes, risk takers against old farts.