In fact, Murdoch, earlier in the day, had been at my lunch table, with Naomi Judd (James Truman had been right next to Judd. “What am I going to talk about with her?” James had asked me; eavesdropping later, I heard them talking about God) and Simpsons creator Matt Groening (The Simpsons are perhaps Fox’s greatest single asset, but Groening was pretty grumpy about Fox) and the (slightly worse for wear) digital guru Nicholas Negroponte (who was bending Rupert’s ear about computer networking). But I demurred, rather than grab my turn with Rupert.
In the past, I had written many unkind things about him, all of which I found myself helplessly regretting now. Had he read them? Did he remember them? Would he hold them against me? (Indeed, at the lunch table, I’d been seated awkwardly between Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe, the founders of Wired, who hadn’t spoken to me since I’d written unkind things about them several years ago.)
Now, as Kurt and I moved tentatively toward where Pam had buttonholed him, Murdoch seemed not only unaccompanied but alone. He had no handlers or retinue. He was clutching his bag of conference swag, including a Tellme Networks teddy bear (“Revolutionizing how people and businesses use the phone”), which he didn’t seem to want to let go of. His face was wrinkled and expressive (definitely no work done on this face). I realized he looked like my grandfather—I could have hugged him.
And finally, there was the competitive thing—someone else would surely talk to him if I didn’t.
Pam, I thought, was unsure how far she could go with him, and seemed almost about to disengage. I caught her eye and made appropriate semifrantic gestures, and suddenly Pam took action: “Rupert,” she said, trying out his name, “we’re going for a drink”—she maneuvered around him (Pam was much taller than Murdoch too; we were, I realized, Rupert and I, the same size)—“Why don’t you come with us?” He wanted, I thought, to be taken in tow.
And so suddenly we were walking along outside the conference center, making conversation with the evil emperor himself. Not only that, but trying to cordon him off, physically close out any other greedy conferees from getting a piece of our kill. Kurt was on one side, I was on the other, Pam was riding shotgun. It felt, in a small but satisfying way, as though we’d kidnapped him.
We were, however, very respectful kidnappers. We were giddy with respectfulness. We were the sycophants; he was the sage. It was very Zennish. We were fast approaching a higher plane of understanding—after all, Murdoch had created, at the very least, the media universe.
There was the sense that any question would be answered—all you had to do was think to ask it. The man with all the answers was here, entirely accessible. And amiable. A mensch, it turned out. He talked not just without airs but without filters. There was the sense that what he was saying to Kurt and to Pam and to me was what he would say to Peter Chernin, the COO of News Corp.—or to any waiter or passerby who asked.
The man, it was clear, just liked to talk. He liked to talk—pretty much nonstop—about business (one of the reasons, I don’t doubt, that he was on his third marriage).
He didn’t think, he said, that the caps on cross-media ownership that the courts had just removed would result in mad buying of television stations. They were good cash-flow producers, but on the other hand they were, he said, a pain to run—the smaller the station, the bigger the pain. (Of course, Rupert, the nation’s largest station owner, was probably not going to advertise his intention to scoop up new ones.) He went on about the DirecTV deal, seeming wounded but stoic about his apparent loss (in the spring of 2002) to EchoStar. He told the story—with a good sense of frustration and irritation—of the series of ultimatums and extensions in the negotiations and how finally, after one last extension, he’d walked away from the deal he’d worked on for two years and, in a sense, bet his company on. (I felt tested: Would I have walked away?) Then he told the story of selling the Fox Family Channel to Disney—of running into Michael Eisner at Herb Allen’s Sun Valley conference and of how much Michael wanted to do a deal. Apparently any deal.
We wandered into an open bar at a nearby restaurant in Monterey where one of the TED dinners was to be held that night—but there was no bartender. Still talking about the Disney deal, rehashing the billions he’d gotten, Rupert slipped behind the bar and started to open the wine. “I had to let Peter Chernin do the deal,” he said, “because I couldn’t keep a straight face.”
Then a Forbes reporter waiting in the bar, a voluble young man, forcibly interposed himself between Murdoch and Kurt and me. (Pam was trying to get us some service.) We gave him ground because he seemed to be willing to ask the ruder questions.
“You just said you’re too small,” the Forbes guy said, grabbing on to Murdoch’s passing analysis about who might buy Disney. “Are you saying it’s over for News Corp.?”
“We’re fine,” said Rupert, with a shrug that may or may not have been meaningful. (He was so expressive and so unguarded that you began to read nuance and ambivalence into all his gestures.) Then the Forbes reporter began telling Murdoch what he thought Murdoch should be doing, while Rupert listened with great patience, it seemed to me. “Do something,” I beseeched Pam, who cut in on the Forbes guy, steering him off.
Rupert kept talking. He grew more expansive, more conspiratorial, even (although it did seem like he’d conspire with anyone), his commentary more intimate. We proposed that he come with us to the dinner we were scheduled to go to—the literary agent John Brockman’s billionaires’ dinner, a TED ritual.
Was he dressed all right, he wanted to know—his shirt, he said, was $11 from Wal-Mart.
“Don’t go anywhere,” Rupert said when we arrived at Brockman’s dinner. “I just have to pee.”
I had to pee, too, but there was a moment of shifting and reformatting around the tables in the restaurant, and I didn’t want to give any ground. Pam shooed away some interlopers and Kurt anchored an area of seats. Then, when Rupert returned from the men’s room, Pam moved him into a captive position against the wall. Geri Laybourne from the Oxygen Network held him on one side; Walt Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal columnist, was on the other. I was across from him and Kurt was next to me. Only Pam, in some extraordinary act of selflessness, moved out of direct contact (she did ask me a few times later in the evening if I would switch seats with her, but I wouldn’t budge).
Mossberg lectured Rupert about a new sort of viral connectivity (it was the same lecture Rupert had gotten from Negroponte at lunch). And Rupert listened patiently (“I’m interested in this,” he kept saying, although, probably, not very). I talked to him about kids’ schools. My daughters go where one of his daughters had gone.
There is, of course, however passing, the moment when you panic about having taken the proximity drug. How could I? Why did I do it? What damage would it do? But that is, in a second, swept away. You’re high, after all.
You surrender.
It didn’t seem like there was anything Rupert was holding back on. Offer him a name, and he’d give you the skinny. “What about Sumner?” “What about Messier?” At one point, Geri Laybourne was surprised enough at Murdoch’s openness to ask him about it.
“I am,” said the mogul, obviously enjoying himself, “as big a gossip as anyone—bigger.”
I could tell you many things about what my friend Rupert told me about his fellow moguls—except that, when high on proximity, you don’t necessarily remember things too well.
4
THE
REHEARSAL
Gary Ginsberg is Murdoch’s go-to guy.
His name is everywhere at News Corp. He’s the check-with person. He’s the interpretive person. If you wanted to know what would Murdoch think about something, you ask Gary. He’s known not just in the organization, but all around the media world. He’s often spottable at Michael’s. Murdoch himself is a remote presence—spectral even. Ginsberg is the reality. He has a high title, executive vice president. But his relationship with Murdoch often seems more intimate than corporate. In some sense,
his functions are quite lowly. He’s an aide. A shadow. The guy at the shoulder. He spends a lot of time observing. It’s his job to know the lay of the land, to pick up on the subtleties. It’s more emotional than businesslike.
He’s early-forties and boyish with a full head of hair. There’s a famous picture of him without a shirt playing football with John F. Kennedy Jr. Ginsberg is a lawyer who did legal work for Kennedy and then went to work for Kennedy at George magazine and has become something of a keeper of the JFK Jr. flame (he worked in the Clinton White House too).
Murdoch and JFK Jr. might seem like an odd set. But they’re both larger than life, and they both have seemed to possess great secrets—to know things that mere mortals would not know. To a degree they are both abstractions, carrying more symbolic weight than actual weight. For someone who has worked for JFK Jr. and acquired the skill-sets for dealing with a man who is not like other men—a man who is imbued with so many sun-god attributes—it is no small stroke of brilliance to realize that one of the few people to whom these skills would transfer is Murdoch.
In this, you can partly see why Murdoch is not hopelessly tarred with the right-wing brush, why Murdoch himself has not become here, as he has in the U.K., a political issue. This is because of the transcendence factor. Murdoch may be politically retrograde, but that doesn’t define or even describe Murdoch as much as it becomes a detail of a grand and unknowable strategy. Indeed, who doesn’t believe that if his politics ceased to serve his strategy, his politics would change?
Ginsberg, for instance, is a perfectly liberalish young man—even with some political ambitions perhaps—who is able to overlook the Murdoch politics and ideology because he sees a much larger thing. Politics for Murdoch is a subsidiary holding—which could be sold, or spun out, or refinanced at any time. Media, Murdoch knows, and Ginsberg has come to appreciate, is so vastly larger than politics. By that same token, Murdoch, better than virtually all other media executives, has understood that you play politics in service to larger media ambitions.
Murdoch is certainly smart for having someone like Ginsberg. You would, in fact, assume that Murdoch would be more Mafia like—that his capos would be more or less official guard-dog types, regimented, and opaque. In the style of dictators everywhere.
Ginsberg, however, is just the opposite. He’s the outsider who’s been put in the insider role. This means that he still has the credibility (although, of course, some people question that) and, more important, the language to talk to outsiders (the language restores the credibility). His thing is to be as surprised by, and impressed by, and fascinated by, and appalled by (this is implied rather than stated) Murdoch as anyone. The only difference is that he has more information and more insight by which to explain the man.
Ginsberg comes off as something of a biographer rather than a PR guy. It’s as though he’s hanging around Murdoch to write the story. He doesn’t seem at all like a toady; in fact, like a biographer, he doesn’t even, necessarily, seem like he’s being paid—or that he’s even doing anything. He just seems to be there, assessing. And what he gets out of it, instead of a salary (although, I imagine, his actual salary is high six figures), is this incredible opportunity to see the operation transpire and unfold. It’s access of an undreamed-of kind. Of course, it’s access of such a high order that they will have to kill him—or bind him up in vast and intricate nondisclosure agreements—before they ever let him go to tell this story (hence, the reason they have to pay him the money).
I always feel with Gary that he wants to tell you something—and in fact he does tell you a little, he always imparts a detail—but there are great underground reservoirs that you’ll never get to.
He called me to say there was a wrinkle.
Actually it was gauzier than that. Ginsberg phrased everything in the conditional. There was some talk that… Was it your understanding that…? There was interest … discussions … we had indicated we might be willing …
Here’s the thing with any conference: The big guys are always pulling out at the last minute. The bigger the guy, the greater the likelihood that he will, if something better comes up, pull out. It’s a triage world. And, at any conference, in the days preceding there is always a series of negotiations and threats and basic, undignified begging.
It’s part of the conference imperative: to have, among the speakers, such a critical mass of peers that it becomes significantly more difficult to pull out. If you do, your peers will think you’re a drip.
But with Murdoch, no matter who the other speakers are, it’s hard to bind him—in other words, he has no exact peer.
What’s more, with someone like Murdoch, it’s not really his capital that’s invested here, but, rather, it’s Ginsberg’s; nobody’s ever going to blame Rupert himself.
You can imagine how this goes: Heilemann and Battelle and maybe even Rattner approach Ginsberg (there would be no way to directly approach Murdoch, no language even to discuss this with him; Murdoch would not even have in some sense the authority to discuss such an arrangement about himself), who would equivocate, take it under advisement, and then, in probably not-so-direct ways, take it up with Murdoch himself.
It would be more a thesis than a question: Rattner and his new investment group are doing an Allen & Company—type conference in the autumn, it might have good people.
Ginsberg gauges Murdoch’s response: from no response, to merest acknowledgment, to neutral expression of interest, to positive expression of interest, to real, unexpected interest.
And then Ginsberg evaluates the larger agenda.
How public has Murdoch been of late? How much more or less public does he want to be? Is there a reason to be public? Is there a message to deliver, shape, reinforce?
And then, what of the conference itself? Organizers are always promising that Jesus and Lincoln will show up, but, as often as not, the final lineup is a steep falling-off. You don’t want to be the best piece of real estate on a fading block.
And, as likely, meanwhile you’ve had a better invitation. Or in Murdoch’s schedule, as complex and negotiated and as far-flung as any in the world, it just might be, last minute, that the conference piece falls out. Which then becomes Ginsberg’s job to handle.
Hence, the wrinkle.
Rupert was going to be in London on the day and hour of his prospective appearance with me on the stage in New York. But they could do it as a live-link satellite hookup—Murdoch did, after all, own one of the largest satellite broadcasting companies in the world.
But Rupert didn’t want to look like a god, or monster, being beamed down to the conference.
Also, Rupert was worried about the satellite delay.
And too, Rupert didn’t want to be in a room all alone looking into a camera.
It was impossible to tell if this was Rupert’s vanity and stage fright at issue or if Ginsberg was simply doing his job—trying to anticipate the problems of a satellite Rupert and trying to jockey for the best suitable staging situation. In the end, if Rupert looked bad, Ginsberg would get the guff.
Would I, therefore, come to London and do the interview with Rupert, which would then be beamed back to the conference in New York, Ginsberg said Rupert wanted to know?
At the same time, I guessed that the other variable was the state of Rupert’s DirecTV deal—and that Ginsberg was weighing Murdoch’s availability against whatever might transpire on that deal front.
While the DirecTV pieces finally fell into position, Murdoch might want to keep a low profile. Or it might be that exactly at this point Murdoch would want to begin an extended victory walk.
At any rate, I didn’t especially want to go to London—assuming even that London was a legitimate issue, and not just some smokescreen to temporize or get Rupert out of having to do the conference and this conversation with me.
I thought it was slightly creepy, too. Showing up in London to interview Murdoch had a Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous aspect to it. Interviewing the king in the p
alace. It’s an unseemly bending-over accommodation to make.
On the other hand, I said, of course I’d go to London. “Whatever it takes,” I said to Ginsberg, which is what you say.
“You can come in the morning. Go to sleep for a few hours and then come to the SKY studios where we’ll do the interview. Rupert says Rattner should pay,” said Ginsberg, which, as soon as he said it, made me realize the likelihood of this happening was small—the etiquette of the arrangement wasn’t going to be easy.
“I can only do it if I go first-class,” I emailed Heilemann, knowing that this would likely be the capper. I wasn’t worth an extra $8,000 to anyone. Also, you could count on a passive-aggressive standoff between the two rich men—especially over a first-class ticket.
The issue went away. Rupert would sit alone in a room, and I would speak to him from the stage in New York, via satellite.
This was our rehearsal lunch just before Rupert left for London and two days before the conference began.
As office towers go, the News Corp. building on Sixth Avenue and 47th Street in Manhattan is something of a downmarket affair. Fox News broadcasts from here (the Fox studios have a fabled tawdriness—with a green room where no reasonable person would eat the Danish for fear of food poisoning) and the corporate offices are upstairs—it has a living-above-the-store feeling. Likewise, the New York Post, removed from its storied headquarters on South Street, operates out of a corner of a floor here, a great metropolitan newspaper reduced to a back office.
You clearly get the point at the News Corp. building that one of the virtues of tabloid journalism is that it’s cheap—there isn’t any pretense. Part of your economic advantage as a tabloidist is that you’re never putting on the Ritz (unlike more Tiffany-esque news organizations).
Ginsberg came and got me in the lobby. He seemed sheepish and amused. This was partly about the London go-round, but even more generally was the implicit understanding that us—that is, reasonably intelligent, liberalish, savvy media guys—being here, at the heart of the Murdoch empire, was one of those things. Strange bedfellows.
Autumn of the Moguls Page 14