Autumn of the Moguls

by Michael Wolff

  The ultimate goal he’s been fighting for over the last few years is to combine his worldwide satellite properties with DirecTV and become television’s nonterrestrial overlord. For that, he’ll also have to convince the government that he’s such a relative minnow that it won’t represent any sort of extreme concentration of power if he monopolizes the fastest-growing television signal distribution system.

  Yes, it could be good for Murdoch if I paint a vivid enough picture of mogul vulnerability: Certainly I believe that just as the media is being thoroughly consolidated, it is fracturing all over—and, therefore, Murdoch and other moguls would argue, needs to be consolidated still further.

  Still, it’s surely a sensitive spot I’m in. There exists for every HarperCollins author the specter of the last governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patton, whose book Murdoch canceled because it got in the way of his plans to control China. Of course, that was China.

  Now possibly, by anticipating this conflict, by hanging a hat on it, I may have slyly, albeit obviously, carved out some room to maneuver here for myself.

  What’s more, I’ve now even made it part of the shtick which could draw attention to this book and help Murdoch make more money (and me too—we’re in this together).

  And I can still punt, or at least feint. To wit: As large as Murdoch looms, as central as he’s been, he is a vastly less ridiculous figure than his mogul brethren.

  In some sense he’s just an old-fashioned newspaperman; his early reputation was certainly as a mere vulgar tabloid guy, more a promoter and a gambler than the visionary he’s now become. When you un-demonize Murdoch, when you separate him from his right-wing politics and predatory disposition, you can easily find yourself thinking what fun it must be to have been him. In fact, we admire (secretly admire, anyway) Murdoch because he’s created an enterprise that only he would have created. News Corp. is an eccentric, nonrational, highly personal company. It’s all about his interests: the Australian and English stuff, the American networks, the satellite systems, a major book company, not to mention the continued existence of the New York Post (how many people who can create a tabloid front page have great financial skills?). It’s all about him.

  And yet, what happened, what has become the underlying motivation for the past twenty years of media history, what has brought the media business now to the brink of chaos, is that everybody else decided they had to do what Murdoch was doing. Every other would-be media conglomerate has had to create itself in the Murdoch—News Corp. image. What’s more, Murdoch laid out the way: Owning one company enabled you to buy another and another; tricks of corporate finance let you reach way beyond mortal ambitions—not just a network or a movie studio, but the entire communications and sensory apparatus.

  Almost right away this got ridiculous. Murdoch was flying seat-of-the-pants and everybody else was thinking this was a brilliant, case-study-worthy, geopolitical business strategy.

  Murdoch himself is a casual opportunist. (One of my all-time favorite moments of Murdoch opportunity: Murdoch, in 1976, owned newspapers in Australia and in the U.K. and a paper in San Antonio, Texas. He had taken a summer rental in East Hampton, near the home of Clay Felker, the founder of New York magazine, whom he invited to dinner, along with Felker’s houseguests, writers Aaron Latham and Susan Braudy. As the courses were served with the help of the Murdoch children, Elisabeth, Lachlan, and James, Felker talked about the unique position New York occupied in the city’s social and media world and the remarkable talent the magazine had attracted. He mentioned, too, the increasing disputatiousness of New York’s board of directors. Murdoch confined his conversation to observations about the price of paper, telling Braudy that he was in the U.S. to buy forests. Over the next several months, Murdoch first bought the New York Post—after being introduced to Post owner Dorothy Schiff by Felker—then, with Felker continuing to confide in him about the problems with his board, entered into negotiations with New York’s board members, who, over Felker’s fierce protests, sold the magazine to him.)

  But faster and faster, Murdoch’s mere opportunism became a Big Idea, part of the business canon: You can’t own just one media sector—you had to own all of them. Just like Murdoch.

  So on the one hand, you had Murdoch doing his unlikely and high-risk thing. On the other hand, you had a lot of other people suddenly believing the Murdoch thing was a science, a kind of genius—a sort of historical inevitability.

  Because of Murdoch, virtually everyone in the media believes that the media, from newspapers to magazines to television to satellites to movies to books to the Internet, are one big ball of wax: in for a penny, in for a pound. What’s more, Murdoch’s mogul (focused on market dominance to the exclusion of all other concerns), the mogul as consummate control freak—unlike the more flamboyant version (from Louis B. Mayer to Robert Maxwell to Ted Turner)—has become the enduring archetype: A mogul stands alone behind the curtain, working all the levers.

  And yet, more and more, pathos seemed to attach to him.

  He turned 71 in the spring of 2002. There was no way out of that.

  Vulnerability crowded him.

  I thought that getting close, sitting knee to knee, I might be able to open him up.

  Book

  TWO

  Autumn

  1

  THE LIFE OF

  THE PARTY

  A few weeks before the Foursquare conference, I got an invitation to attend a book party at the Rattners’. Once before, picking up my son Steven, I’d been able to glimpse into the apartment—but that was just a furtive, fleeting look.

  I RSVPed now with great (and pathetic) interest and alacrity.

  Book parties in Manhattan may be the functional equivalent of Tupperware parties or bridal showers in other places. (This isn’t the literary life anymore; publishers no longer even throw an author a party—you have to recruit friends or get your day job to throw you one, or find sponsors, like a vodka brand.) Book parties are like books: ho-hum, with a certain desperation too. If you are not tied to a book or its party by obligation, you skip it. But this was something else—beyond the apartment being a big draw, this was an invitation from someone with so much money and so many possibilities that it suggested command performance.

  The party was for a book called The Great Tax Wars by Steven Weisman, an old friend of Rattner’s and of mine. Weisman had started at the Times in the late sixties (he was a few years older than me and the first person in the heartless newsroom to be nice to me) and stayed, and stayed, and risen to the estimable but faceless rank of Times editorial writer. But the party surely had a larger point.

  The imbalance was obvious. Imbalance? This was monumental disproportion.

  There were book parties—I’d guess half a dozen were going on that evening around Manhattan—and then there was a party at the Rattners’. When you’re trying to get someone to throw you a book party, you always try for your friend with the best apartment—but the Rattners’ apartment utterly transcended such neighborliness, or hamish ness, and essential small-timeness. In some way, in fact, the party became about the disparity itself. Why were we here? What message was being sent?

  Now, serious party-giving in Manhattan is a complicated statement. Careers are made around serious parties. (A dowager friend who I have known since long before her dowager days has exactingly analyzed it: In Manhattan, your career is who you go out with at night.) To be able to give a serious party, to have either the wealth or the will (or both) to give a serious party, puts you in a whole different circle of achievement and ambition.

  You don’t, at this level, just give a party to give a party. There is no celebration for its own self. There is always an agenda. Sometimes it’s a simple one: just to create a diversion through which to introduce this person to that person (overwhelmingly more likely to be a business than romantic introduction). But usually it’s a much more complex program: You’re locating yourself in the hierarchy. Or, even more complexly, you’re using a party as a kind
of media (of course, most Manhattan parties are media parties) with which to target a set of people and deliver a message. The message may be about power, or wealth, or taste, or aspirations—or, sometimes, most grandly, all of the above. This message is most concretely delivered through the display of who you know and who you can compel to come to your party. This, you are saying, is where I am located in the great media network; and this is, too, a demonstration of my ability to effect or control the network.

  The point of the Rattner party was, on the face of it, a kind of indulgence (the point was the publication of a book, but that, quickly, became rendered as, How nice, how extremely nice, how really oddly nice of the Rattners to do this). This indulgence established the mood, the conviviality, the theme if you will.

  There is, in party-giving parlance, the excuse for the party. People will even say, “What’s the excuse?” It’s the nod to something other than one’s own narcissism and desire to facilitate connections and relationships and set in motion future development which, because you’ve engaged them, will involve you. There has to be a selfless reason for the party, and that was Steve Weisman’s book.

  It was a work, obviously, of smartness and fortitude—an uncommercial book written over many years of after-hours labor. Writing the book was a good deed and giving a party for the book a doubly good deed.

  It was a noblesse oblige thing.

  And yet it was surely not just that—noblesse oblige is never just that.

  There is a tone of money. The tone is both about self-expression and about a more strategic outlook. Unlike in many other eras, there is no right tone—but it is hard, not to mention pointless, to be rich and have no tone. Every hundred million or so makes you more resonant. (It is sometimes of great anthropological interest to come upon vastly rich people in New York who have actually acquired little tone. Bill Ziff, the publisher of hobby and computer magazines, and, arguably, the most financially successful media figure of the age—he cashed out of the media business with $4 billion or $5 billion, whereas everyone else’s paper billions are much more equivocal—was atonal. He really appeared to have none of the social, philanthropic, aesthetic, or further power ambitions that would have given him tone.) The tonal range runs from the most slapstick and vulgar and unreconstructed. This would include, for instance, Harvey Weinstein, the obese New York movie producer. And moves on to a slicker, more efficient, no-nonsense, money-buys-everything-including-respectability affect (this might include, for instance, Sandy Weill, the financier who came to control Citigroup). And soon reaches a kind of lugubrious respectability (which is where most people worth various hundreds of millions fall). And then, often, there is an urge for more stylishness—possibly after a divorce—and a media and gossip page presence, and this is where you might get your Broadway investors and such. (The financier Ken Lipper, for instance, who parlayed his wife’s fortune into a larger fortune, and then, after divorcing her, invested in movie and publishing projects, before going belly up, fits here.) And then there is the social tone—that desire to move effortlessly through otherwise resistant and difficult worlds. And this, among certain rich men, breaks out into a sort of forceful I-stand-for-something articulateness (this would include Felix Rohatyn, or George Soros who lived here in the same building with the Rattners on Fifth Avenue), and, often, as part of this articulateness there is an added patina of seriousness and culture (this is, ideally, the tonal group from which you draw museum directors) and too there is the political tone—I am here to serve—for certain rich men who have not quite ever gotten over their own boyhood dreams of being President.

  The subtleties of Rattner’s tone were not yet clear, except for the fact that he was reaching for the upper ranges.

  He was cultured, cool, precise, and ready.

  This party then not only associated Rattner with an earnest work, The Great Tax Wars (lending him a certain policy-wonkishness too), but was, also, a many-shaded invocation of Rattner’s own Times connection. Rattner could have the benefits of the Times plus the few hundred million he’d made not being at the Times.

  There was Weisman’s wife, too, Elisabeth Bumiller, who was the Times White House reporter. (Weisman, older than his wife, had had this same job twenty years and three administrations before.)

  It was then a party whose message was bookishness and wonkishness and Timesness and political-connectedness—that was the backdrop.

  But most of all, the theme was publicness. I am a giver of parties, was the overriding statement, to which other public people come.

  Rattner was, accordingly, a public man.

  This was an add-on to the tone thing. Being public, being out there, was an additional commitment, and represented further longings, and an effort at being a media figure as well as someone who controls the media (hence, you hold a conference).

  This role, or the interest in playing this role, may be what separates, in the late 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, one ambitious person from another. It’s the thing that creates a special class of the ambitious, and a special order of compensation. How public do you want to be? How public are you temperamentally able to be?

  Notably, Rattner did not seem to be obviously and instinctively a public guy. There was a lack of extroversion and of, well, sex appeal.

  Will, however, was more important than nature.

  The apartment obviously anticipated this larger role—this reinvention.

  The Rattners had lived here when he was running the media practice at Lazard and jockeying for the top spot. But it was certainly not the apartment of a specialist at an investment bank, or a number two. It was a potentate’s place.

  It was a public apartment.

  The elevators opened in a massive foyer which in turn opened into an even larger anteroom which opened into the main gallery running in front of Central Park. The room was a careful, muted, just-so green affair, with much elaborate and detailed plasterwork.

  The original version of a recognizable painting hung at the end of the foyer.

  It was all presentation. It was 19th century.

  It was an attempt at salon life. There was very little furniture.

  It pushed the bounds of self-consciousness and only just skirted ridiculousness.

  In the room just after the room following the big foyer, I was grateful to immediately run into Jonathan Alter, Newsweek’s political and media correspondent.

  I was always running into Alter at cocktail parties—which meant he was always at these parties. Of course, he could construe this as meaning I was always there too.

  But I was fairly sure that he was the insider and I was the interloper.

  I believed that there was, in some sense, a permanent cocktail party. A circle of observers of power and of the powerful who not only had a certain high level of connectedness—Alter was a much more credible Walter Lippmann than I would ever be—but who had the fortitude to keep showing up at all these parties.

  This was the media establishment—or these people were the glue that held the establishment together, the grout between the tiles.

  You couldn’t have an establishment without people who acknowledged the structure and worked within it and provided the infrastructure to keep it standing.

  Alter was not here as a mere observer to power, but as a participant. He was not here as an outsider, or agitator, or jaundiced eye.

  The point was that I knew the permanent circle at these parties because I had seen the circle at these parties over so many years. So to come up with a justification of why I was not, by any measure, also a permanent part of this circle was less than intuitive.

  I do not know if my interest in deconstructing this hierarchy actually put me further out or drew me further in.

  I am not sure, either, that my own chronic sense of displacement would excuse me. Indeed, I could not, of course, vouch that Alter himself—in many ways, awkward and scattered—did not also feel displaced. He might also need a friend.

  Now, Alter was
in the very solid top rank of more or less Official Journalists. I would guess that there might be no more than fifty people of his rank (five to ten of whom would be at this party, one might assume). It was a rank achieved not so much by journalistic talent as by other aspirations. Social aspirations. Corporate aspirations. And a certain kind of media presence all your own. Alter was not just a Newsweek writer, but a frequent television commentator. Alter was not just a partygoer, but a host as well—I had interloped on his big-deal party on the beach at the Malibu Colony during the 2000 Democratic convention in Los Angeles.

  And yet, there was something missing about Alter. Some status unattained.

  Indeed, he was only dimly aware of Rattner’s coming conference, and uninvited to the mogulfest.

  The medium was the issue.

  Time and Newsweek had been the middle-of-the-road opinion journals for the last few generations. If there was a consensus, it was to be found there. That was a powerful thing, to be part of that. It was an official thing. And there still was that officialness. The President, one could be sure, knew what was in Time and Newsweek. The problem is that nobody else did. While they had a combined circulation of some six or seven million, it was dead circulation. Millions of people who had no real interest and no true reaction. What’s more, they had become, in some real sense, women’s magazines—health, religion, lifestyle, recreation. For a serious—in fact overly serious—man, it was hard to rise above this.

  Alter had tried to adjust, using television, but television also was not an ideal medium for a serious man.

  Shortly after some trudging small talk (I liked Alter, but I am not sure we ever had a lot to say to each other), Alter engaged us in a little chatter with Mrs. Eliot Spitzer, wife of the New York State attorney general, who was aggressively prosecuting rogue businessmen and aggressively promoting himself.