Tuesdays with Rupert

Since buying The Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch has talked freely with the author about his business, his family, and the future. (There was serious gossip, too.) It’s an unparalleled look at the 77-year-old mogul, transformed by his marriage to Wendi Deng, yet utterly, unapologetically himself.

by MICHAEL WOLFFOctober 2008

For nine months, I’ve been interviewing Rupert Murdoch, in an unlikely spirit of openness precipitated by his great satisfaction in having bought The Wall Street Journal, about journalism, his business, politics, his family, and the future for a new biography. I was warned about his charm by many other journalists—warned not to fall victim to it. So the surprise was his lack of it. He’s without introspection and self-analysis and doesn’t like to talk about the past. What’s more, he mumbles terribly (and with a heavy Aussie accent) and seldom finishes a sentence. For the first three months of our interviews, he never addressed a word to or even looked at my research assistant, Leela de Kretser, who was at each of the sessions, and ignored her questions—perhaps because it’s not necessary to acknowledge a girl, or possibly because it was embarrassing for him that she was, at the time, a pregnant girl. (She had the baby. He eventually warmed up.)

But his odd lack of seductiveness or felicitousness—contributing to his aura of villainy—became after a while alluring in itself. There’s no spin, because he really can’t explain himself. Rather, what you see is what you get. He’s transparent. The nature of the beast is entirely evident.

One morning when Leela and I arrived at Murdoch’s office for another interview session, we found the 77-year-old News Corp. chairman and C.E.O. hunched over the phone reporting out a story. He’d been out the night before and gotten a tip. Now he was trying to nail it down. His side of the conversation was straight reporter stuff: Who could he call? How could he get in touch? Will they confirm? Barked, impatient, just the facts. Here was the old man, in white shirt, singlet visible underneath, doing one of the same basic jobs he’d been doing since he was 22, having inherited theAdelaide News in Australia from his father. And he was good at it. He was parsing each answer. Re-asking the question. Clarifying every point. His notepad going. He knew the trade. Of how many media-company C.E.O.’s could that be said? This wasn’t a destroyer of journalism—this was a practitioner.

On the other hand, he was trying to smear somebody. At the dinner party he’d attended—since his marriage to Wendi Deng, he’s become an unlikely fixture at fashionable tables—he heard that a seniormost Hillary Clinton operative was a partner in an online porn company. He didn’t like the operative, didn’t like—no matter how much he had tried—Hillary Clinton. So it didn’t much matter that the story itself seemed far-fetched and tenth-hand. It was juicy and would slime somebody he thought was … a slime. True, it didn’t pan out—and, to his credit, that was the end of it. Well, sort of. Because he kept recycling it. While it did not end up on the Post’s “Page Six,” it became a staple in Murdoch’s repertoire of whispers and confidences and speculations. Rupert Murdoch doesn’t need to print or broadcast the news to make it … news.

He may be among the biggest gossips in New York. In the months of interviewing him, I found that the most reliable way to hold his interest was to bring him a rich nugget. His entire demeanor would change. He’d instantly light up. He’d go from distracted to absolutely focused. Gossip gives him life (and business opportunities). This, I believe, is how the rumor about Michael Bloomberg’s buying The New York Timesgot legs. I offered it to him as a bit of speculation—conflating two of his favorite subjects, Bloomberg, whom he greatly admires, and the Times, which he does not—that a Bloomberg-Times deal could be possible. He paused, considered, opened his mouth, seemed blissed out for a second, processed this information against his own needs and interests … and then said, “It makes sense. I think I’ll ask him.” And suddenly the rumor was everywhere—he was telling everybody, which made it true. The mayor’s people seemed to like the rumor so much that they began to talk it up themselves. Bloomberg himself seemed to fancy it (offering only a tepid denial) and, Murdoch thinks, could act on it.

He’s a troublemaker—maybe the last troublemaker in the holier-than-thou, ethically straitjacketed news business:

Gary Ginsberg, Murdoch’s chief aide and one of News Corp.’s highest executives—and a former Clinton White House staffer—told his boss that he was planning to go to Paris, in August 2007, for the wedding of his friend Doug Band, Bill Clinton’s chief aide. Band was marrying the handbag designer Lily Raf?i, and the wedding was going to be a party-hearty Clinton affair with supermarket magnate Ron Burkle, real-estate-heir-film-producer Steve Bing, and Bill Clinton himself, Ginsberg reported to Murdoch (Ginsberg too knows that Murdoch likes—needs—gossip). So Murdoch, onto not just a good story but also a way to annoy Ginsberg, secretly called the New York Post editor, Col Allan, and, busting the expense budget, had “Page Six” send a reporter to Paris. Headline (to Ginsberg’s consternation): bill & pals do paris (the city, not the bimbo).

The great fear about Rupert Murdoch, among journalists and proper liberals everywhere, beyond even his tabloidism and his right-wing politics, is that he acknowledges no rules. He does it, without mercy, his way. If you watch him up close, this certainly seems true. He sits in his office and plots and schemes and figures out ways to get (to take) what he wants.

Although he’d agreed with the Bancroft family, Dow Jones’s former owners, to accept a strict structure for protecting The Wall Street Journal’s editorial independence, I watched how blithely he paid no attention to it. It barely figured into his plans or consciousness. Except that he seemed briefly tickled to have figured out that if he merely called his chosen editor, Robert Thomson, the publisher, then he’d have his choice. He was only slightly confounded (and a bit bemused) that it took Journal editor Marcus Brauchli four months to get the message that he was out.

Still, up close, such lack of restraint doesn’t necessarily seem so threatening. It seems, in fact … fun. There’s no artifice. There’s no bureaucracy. There’s no pretense. There’s no corporate this and that—Murdoch’s truly the anti-corporate man. It’s all determination and enthusiasm. It’s all about his passions and the effect he can have. (Of course he was going to replace the Journal’s editor. What was everybody thinking?)

It’s his adventure. Part of the reason so many of the people around him are so loyal—such true believers—is that they’re caught up in it. It’s a grand enterprise.

Though not necessarily such a well-organized or even rational one.

There was the moment, in the car heading out to the airport in the weeks before The Wall Street Journalformally became his, when Merrill Lynch was going into the tank. Its C.E.O., Stan O’Neal, had just been fired. Anticipating events—Merrill’s need for cash, its inevitable sale of assets—Murdoch, for an hour or so, decided he ought to be the presumptive buyer of Merrill’s 20 percent stake in Bloomberg (Murdoch cultivates obsessions, and Bloomberg is one). Soon to have The Wall Street Journal, now soon to have his mitts on Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, at least in his own mind, would control worldwide financial information. It’s management by fantasy—even though this one, like so many, was shortly to pass.

Buying The Wall Street Journal was surely an exercise of pure fantasy. To think he could take over a company absolutely controlled by a family that had repeatedly said it would never sell was fantasy. To think it was worth what he was paying for it was fantasy. And yet … now it’s his, and if his shareholders are puzzled and grumpy (News Corp. shares are down by more than 30 percent since he bought Dow Jones), so be it (he’ll ignore them as much as he ignores his other critics). He’s in it for the long haul—even at 77.

He is spending time now in consideration of an even more far-fetched fantasy, The New York Times:he’d really like to own it too. Now, everybody around him continues to tell him that buying theTimes is pretty much impossible. There will be regulatory problems. The Sulzberger family would never … And then there’s the opprobrium of public opinion.

But it’s obviously irresistible to him. I’ve watched him go through the numbers, plot out a merger with the Journal’s backroom operations, and fantasize about the staff’s quitting en masse as soon as he entered the sacred temple. It would be sweet revenge—because the Times for so long has made him the bogeyman and vulgarian. And wonderful to own not just one of America’s most important papers but both (he believes in monopolies). And the realization of his destiny: because the Times represents the ultimate in newspaper proprietorship—when he was 19, he and his father, the most successful newspaper executive in Australia, made a pilgrimage to Hillandale, the Sulzberger family home in Connecticut—and he believes he is the ultimate newspaper proprietor.

And because he loves newspapers—he may be the last person to love newspapers. He thinks the Times,with its soft stories and newsless front page and all its talk of being a news brand instead of a newspaper,has forsaken what a newspaper is.

He’s really not interested in all this talk about newspapers as the basis of new information franchises … blah blah. That’s maybe what they say at News Corp. to gull Wall Street. But Rupert Murdoch wants the physical thing. He pokes the paper, slashes at it—move this, reduce that, enlarge this. It may be the ultimate fantasy, his continuing, contrary belief in newspapers.

A newspaper makes you into something. When he bought The Sun in London in 1969, it turned him into Britain’s greatest tabloid publisher and threat to ritual and propriety. The Wall Street Journal is going to turn him into something else again.

Here’s the headline: Rupert Murdoch is becoming a liberal—sort of.

Or, anyway, his purchase of The W.S.J., and his covetousness of the Times, is also about wanting to trade the illiberal—the belligerent, the vulgar, the loud, the menacing, the unsubtle—for the better-heeled, the more magnanimous, the further nuanced. He’s looking for better company.

This most unsocialized of men is becoming socialized—sort of.

This is, in part, the Wendi transformation. The woman from Shandong Province, 38 years his junior, whom he married after breaking up his 32-year marriage to his second wife, Anna, has brought him into the liberal world. The angry outsider, the anti-elitist, the foe of airs and pretension (“Ole Grumpy,” as he’s known by various of his employees), has become part of the achieving, glamorous, clever, socially promiscuous set. Davos, Cannes, Sun Valley, Barry Diller’s yacht—this is now Rupert Murdoch’s world.

Or it’s his wife’s world, which he’s been drawn into.

It would be hard not to be. The girl whose American adventure starts in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant before she can speak English and takes her to the Yale School of Management and then into the arms of Rupert Murdoch is a compelling heroine. Her adventure may be as great as his. He’s captivated by her ambition (their pillow talk, one might suspect, is business). You can see this as comic: no fool like an old fool—the shapeless conservative suits become Prada (although still worn with the singlets), his gray hair flaming orange (or sometimes aubergine). But I think that misses the true nature of the change. Of the plot twist. Rupert Murdoch is, characteristically, seizing an opportunity. The Zeitgeist is changing and he’s after it.

All right, he’s not quite a liberal. He remains a militant free-marketeer and is still pro-war (grudgingly, he’s retreated a bit). And there was the moment, one afternoon, when over a glass of his favorite coconut water (meant to increase electrolytes) he was propounding the genetic theory that the basic problem of the Muslim people was that they married their cousins.

And yet, he’s come to like the liberals more than the conservatives. Bono and Tony Blair and the Google guys and Nicole Kidman and David Geffen are his and Wendi’s circle. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and real-estate scion and New York Observer owner Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump are regular invites to the Murdochs’ for dinner. Liking Wendi’s friends so much better than his own (actually, he really had never had any friends), he finds himself with an increasingly divided temperament.

It’s life with Wendi versus life with Fox. (And, too, it’s The Wall Street Journal—and maybe The New York Times—versus Fox.)

Fox has been his alter ego. For a long time he was in love with the Fox chief, Roger Ailes, because he was even more Murdoch than Murdoch. And yet now the embarrassment can’t be missed—he mumbles even more than usual when called on to justify it; he barely pretends to hide the way he feels about Bill O’Reilly. And while it is not possible that he would give Fox up—because the money is the money; success trumps all—in the larger sense of who he is, he seems to want to hedge his bets.

Just before the New York Democratic primary, when I found myself undecided between Clinton and Obama, I said to Murdoch (a little flirtation, like a little gossip, softens him), “Rupert, I don’t know who to vote for—so I’m going to give you my vote. You choose.”

He paused, considered, nodded his head slowly: “Obama—he’ll sell more papers.”

Even though his daughter Elisabeth and her husband, high-flying P.R. man Matthew Freud, have been raising money for Obama in Notting Hill, in London, where they live, and his wife has been attending fund-raisers for Obama in Los Angeles with David Geffen, this is a leap for Murdoch. Murdoch has traditionally liked politicians to come to him. His historic shift in the 1990s to Tony Blair came after Blair made a pilgrimage to Australia.

Obama, on the other hand, was snubbing Murdoch. Every time he reached out (Murdoch executives tried to get the Kennedys to help smooth the way to an introduction), nothing. The Fox stain was on Murdoch.

It wasn’t until early in the summer that Obama relented and a secret courtesy meeting was arranged. The meeting began with Murdoch sitting down, knee to knee with Obama, at the Waldorf-Astoria. The younger man was deferential—and interested in his story. Obama pursued: What was Murdoch’s relationship with his father? How had he gotten from Adelaide to the top of the world?

Murdoch, for his part, had a simple thought to share with Obama. He had known possibly as many heads of state as anyone living today—had met every American president from Harry Truman on—and this is what he understood: nobody got much time to make an impression. Leadership was about what you did in the first six months.

Then, after he said his piece, Murdoch switched places and let his special guest, Roger Ailes, sit knee to knee with Obama.

Obama lit into Ailes. He said that he didn’t want to waste his time talking to Ailes if Fox was just going to continue to abuse him and his wife, that Fox had relentlessly portrayed him as suspicious, foreign, fearsome—just short of a terrorist.

Ailes, unruffled, said it might not have been this way if Obama had more willingly come on the air instead of so often giving Fox the back of his hand.

A tentative truce, which may or may not have vast historical significance, was at that moment agreed upon.

Iconfess to getting a little misty when Murdoch talks about his children, which he does frequently and naturally (he’s often on the phone with them—this coldest of men making protestations of love).

True, he is often talking about them in some otherworldly, even fantastic dynastic sense—perhaps no other business empire has such an air of royalty about it as News Corp. And yet, at the same time, he seems like any old conscientious dad and ordinarily burdened family man.

For one thing, there is his mother, at 99 an indomitable matriarch—something like the Queen Mum of Australia—at the family estate (which has neither heat nor, apparently, a vacuum cleaner), outside of Melbourne, with the world-famous garden she’s been tending for 80 years, still stewing about the breakup of his second marriage, to Anna. “I remember saying to Rupert, ‘Rupert, you’re going to be very, very lonely and the first desiring female who comes along will snap you up.’ He said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mum, I’m far too old for that.’ That’s exactly what happened. Never mind.” One would not like to face that. (When I visited her, she sat for a three-hour interview full of witty chat and then took me for a wild ride, double-clutching an old golf cart, through her gardens.)

Contrary to the expected outcome in dynastic families, the Murdoch kids have turned out well. They’re diligent achievers. Beyond a few tattoos and piercings and a gossip-column affair (Elisabeth left her husband for Freud), they’re not too rebellious either. And they get along—mostly (though his sons, when they were both on the News Corp. board, sometimes bickered endlessly during meetings). And that’s good because his four oldest children will inherit voting control of one of the most influential companies in the world without any mechanism to break a tie.

There’s Prue, the daughter from his first marriage, a 50-year-old Sydney housewife, the mother of his three oldest grandchildren, who has mostly forgiven him for not considering her—because she was a girl—as dynastic material. Prue, whose husband, Alasdair MacLeod, is a ranking player in the Australian operation, is the child who can most take him to task. (“I’ve said to him, ‘Dad, I understand about dyeing the hair and the age thing’—he never wants to die—‘but just go somewhere proper.’ But he insists on doing it over the sink because he doesn’t want anybody to know. Well, hello! Look in the mirror.”) She is, in a sense, more like his wife than his wives. (Actually, he often mistakes her for one of his sisters.)

There’s Elisabeth, 40, his first child with Anna, who, in his gradually transforming view of women (very gradual), was a candidate for running the company until, mad at him for leaving her mother, she upped and quit in 2000, to his great regret. She now lives in London with Freud and her four children and owns one of the largest independent television-production companies in the world (The Office and Ugly Bettyare her company’s shows).

There’s his first son, Lachlan, 38, whom he had pronounced his heir apparent, whom he openly adores—almost pines after—and who left the company after his father failed to stand up for him against other News Corp. executives. Lachlan, although raised as a New Yorker, has reconstituted himself as an Australian. He owns a cricket team in India and, with Jamie Packer, the son of the late Kerry Packer, one of Murdoch’s epochal enemies in the Australian media wars, tried and failed earlier this year to complete a multi-billion-dollar leveraged buyout of an Australian media company. (Murdoch was obviously pained when I returned from seeing Lachlan in Sydney and knew more about his son’s deal than he did. Pained enough for him to try to pretend he knew—that his son hadn’t excluded him.)

There’s James, of whom he is clearly in some awe. James, who is based in London and who runs News Corp.’s business in Europe and Asia, has become exactly the sort of businessman he himself is not, programmatic, marketing-driven—rather, in fact, a highly intelligent automaton—and is now the favorite to become the C.E.O. of News Corp. (answering, however, to his three siblings, or at least to two of them, to get a majority).

And there are Murdoch’s two youngest children: Grace, aged six, and Chloe, aged five, with whom he lives a Manhattan life of nannies, dogs, play dates, and a father picking up after them.

It’s not just the sense of him as an attentive and concerned father that I find makes me misty, but this further sense he implies, even as he dreams of dynastic succession, of his lack of control over the children and their futures.

If he’s proud of his kids’ separate achievements, he’s desperate to have them back in the business and around him. He openly spins scenarios about how they might be tempted back—stuck with the fact that he’s raised them all well enough that they aren’t particularly dependent on him (and, too, they are savvy enough to have figured out the virtue of distance).

In his divorce from Anna he agreed to make inviolable his four older children’s control and interest in the trust. This agreement became hard to reconcile following the birth of his two younger children, and he petitioned his older children to admit their new siblings to the trust. A long negotiation ensued. He agreed to disburse $150 million to each of his children (with all of the family’s wealth in News Corp. stock, the Murdoch kids have long complained to any News Corp. exec who would listen that they never had much real money to call their own), and, in return, his four older children gave up his ex-wife’s so-called watertight agreement and admitted Grace and Chloe to an equal economic interest in the trust—but not a voting interest. (He was too scared or guilty about this decision to tell his wife directly and, instead, let it slip during an interview in 2006 on Charlie Rose—precipitating, when Wendi watched the interview, a marital battle that is still a legend at News Corp.)

His attitude about this is now curious, or alarming, or crafty. Although his older children happily spell out the terms of the trust, as does Murdoch’s longtime lawyer, Arthur Siskind, Murdoch himself baldly denies that what is, is. All his children will participate equally, he says flatly. This is a broken synapse or his way of dealing with his lack of control or it’s what he’s telling his wife or it’s Murdochian principle that everything can be renegotiated.

His takeover of The Wall Street Journal happened because the family that controlled Dow Jones for nearly a hundred years couldn’t control itself. And while Murdoch both took advantage of the Bancroft family’s weakness and was contemptuous of it (and morbidly fascinated by it), the irony hasn’t passed him by that some variation on this fate will be his family’s, too. (When I asked him in our final interview what he can do to prevent what happened to the Bancrofts from happening to his family, he threw his hands up in the air and said, “Oh, simple, I can’t. All I can do is delay it.”)

There is at News Corp. never a discussion of Murdoch’s exit. It is referred to only as “in 30 or 40 years,” when he is gone—which may have started as an amusing locution, but is now a practiced and even official one. His existential predicament is, in other words, his own.

This is an aspect of his special powers. People at News Corp. really do believe he is near immortal—or they are afraid not to believe (because after him the deluge). And he knows that the world (not just his world but the world he has had such an effect on) exists only as long as he does. Indeed, there may not be newspapers unless he owns them. It’s a world that’s on his shoulders.

It continues to all depend on him.

Michael Wolff is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.