The Man Who Owns the News (51 page)

But there’s business too. Prue’s most direct point of competition is with Lachlan on the other side of Sydney. This is partly territorial: If Lachlan comes back into the business (and it is hard to believe he won’t) and if he takes the job most obviously suited to him—running News Corp.’s Australian operations—that will mean he’s blocked her husband, Alasdair, from getting to the top.

But it is also temperamental: Prue is a self-styled frump, and Lachlan is a self-styled cool dude. Prue is anonymous—“I’ve always been low-key and not many people know about me in a way, and I like that, I just love that”—and Lachlan, to Prue, is the “king of Sydney.” Lachlan lives in a $7 million home with meticulous design detail overlooking Bronte Beach, the most fashionable address in this most fashionable of cities, and Prue lives, in Lachlan’s dismissive description, with the uptight people overlooking the harbor. Lachlan is outdoors and free, with his views of the wild Sydney surf; Prue is closed up and repressed, looking out over the staid bay with its moored yachts.

This is all also primal: Prue grew up as her father’s least loved child, Lachlan as the most loved. What’s more, Lachlan, having received that love, then petulantly turned his back on it—hurting the father whom Prue adores and will always defend.

LACHLAN

Lachlan’s turf, in addition to Bronte, is Surry Hills in Sydney. Surry Hills is where News Ltd. has its headquarters and where, in its new gentrified incarnation, Lachlan has opened offices for the mostly as-yet-to-be-determined activities of his new company. The office he’s set up in a converted warehouse building resembles all self-consciously uncorporate offices in recently gentrified areas of cities around the world.

Once famously handsome and fit—the striking good looks of both Murdoch sons help account for the gay rumors attached to both of these complacently married men—Lachlan, when I visit him in Sydney shortly after the Dow Jones deal is completed, is a contented thirty pounds overweight. At thirty-eight, he now has the same boyish chubbiness that his father had at that age. (Rupert, says Prue, desperately tried to lose weight when they lived in London by trying all manner of faddish diets, grapefruit diet included.)

People mostly comment on the differences between father and son, but the similarities are as pronounced. They both, in one sense, have an odd lack of presence. They’re both standoffish or even shy—making eye contact isn’t their first move—and unexpectedly inarticulate. They both need someone to finish their sentences. (So much for Murdoch’s view of Prue as the inarticulate one and Lachlan as confident and surefooted.)

In our interview, Lachlan is skittish and put-upon. He is talking only on his father’s request. Would rather not be. Except to the extent that he, like Prue, seems clearly to regard this as a dialogue with his old man. The point he wants to make is about being infantilized.

He makes the point without obvious recrimination but with a sense of great burden. Weariness almost. Lachlan, whose career has, in a sense, yet to start, has already experienced a great roller-coaster ride in his professional life. He has been tutored, then been elevated, then been anointed, then been thwarted by his father’s courtiers, then been overtaken by his brother—and then he turned his back on it all.

It’s important to understand how much the Murdochs’ business is suffused with emotion—how deeply involved the children have been with the affairs of the father:

“We walked back to the apartment, I remember—that was when we did the deal [the merger of Sky with British Satellite Broadcasting, which kept News Corp. afloat in 1991]—with the company being at that stage, you know, near, um, dissolvement, I think really, that, um, you know, shook him more than I’ve ever seen. He was—I remember, like, almost like putting him to bed. I mean, I was only whatever—what, sixteen or fifteen or something—but I remember really being worried about him.”

It was a life immersion too:

“You have to understand, my dad never said to us or my mother—my mother didn’t even want us to be—work in the company or be in media, like it was never a—it was never a suggestion that we should be or what we should do, but I think it was, you know, I think obviously as kids growing up, you, you expect that that’s what they want, right, um, but, from the—I think that what people maybe who aren’t in these situations don’t believe—realize—that, and I think also my dad’s being um, being um, uh—and my mother were so involved in the business from like every minute of every day, so growing up around that, right, it wasn’t a business—it wasn’t like Dad goes to work and he works in the media and he comes home, and you know, he’s just Dad. Every breakfast was about media. My dad was, you know, we went through the newspapers every breakfast, through things, we, we would, we—when we got home, Dad would come home usually with, um, businesspeople—every night would be, um, um, be either someone come over for a drink or dinner, usually dinner, then there’d be people in business or in politics around all the time, so he had a constant, you know—even on weekends, right.”

Now, in its way, all this living over the store added up to a stellar upbringing. From an early age each of the professional Murdoch kids was good at what he or she did, certainly far advanced beyond their age and beyond their peers. Rupert Murdoch, focused by his then-wife Anna, set his mind to combining his business interests with proper family life, and raised a coven of media managers.

Which is bound to be a problem: You empower, but then don’t want to cede power. You train, but then don’t let go. It didn’t even cross your mind to, say, let any of the kids get an outside job. Gain a little experience on his or her own. Work for someone else. Nail down a few professional credentials, which might have given a bit of cred beyond the last name. You didn’t encourage that or allow that mostly because it didn’t occur to you that anybody could give your kids a better idea than you could give them. And, too, of course, because you’re nature’s most consummate control freak.

In Lachlan’s case, the father tried to re-create his own history by sending his son to retrace his steps. Lachlan at twenty-two (Rupert’s age when he took over the
Adelaide News
) was sent like a viceroy to Australia—not so much the boy publisher as the boy governor-general. And he was received, in the land Murdoch departed a quarter century before, like a piece of the cloth. He was fathered by everybody at News Ltd. Everybody took pride in his least accomplishments. Not only was he raised to be a media manager at a very young age, he actually became one. And he became the prince of Australia—learned, in fact, how to be an Aussie!—and married a girl who is just like (or at least looks just like) the girl who married dear old dad. He learned the newspaper business and pretty much did everything he was supposed to do that Dad did, and then he was brought back from the provinces to take his rightful and inevitable place at HQ.

What must the old man have been thinking? He must have been thinking in novelistic rather than business or managerial terms. It was some fine fantasy: The beloved son at his side. The beloved son taking over his beloved
New York Post
. The prince being schooled by the regent, Peter Chernin. And, most of all, the son patiently, admiringly, dutifully, loyally, lovingly watching the father as the years ran out, in this way being passed all the secrets of the Murdoch line.

There is no misunderstanding this story line among his father’s retainers. As a name throughout News Corp., Lachlan is almost as redolent as Rupert. Still, if there is within the company an absolute belief in a forthcoming succession and in the Murdochs as royalty, a people apart, there is, too, an obvious and constant comparison between once and future.

If in Australia Lachlan was regarded as a clever and sophisticated guy—a tastemaker—and a good manager who built a strong rapport both in the Australian newsrooms and with his executives, in the United States he was a weak, even pitiable, version of his dad. He was too sensitive; he was petulant; he lacked charm; he was not sharp.

The father in small but constant ways humiliated the son, which made him a joke to everybody else. In every meeting the father was the impatient, domineering, fussing presence. He couldn’t stop calling attention to himself and away from the son. At the same time, the son, stamping his foot, was trying to call attention to himself. He started marketing campaigns for the
Post
—tried to bring a little class to a notoriously unclassy operation by throwing functions and parties in the tabloid’s name. Over on the West Coast, he hung out with movie stars and insisted his dad make smarter and hipper movies (
Fight Club,
which Murdoch detested, was a Lachlan-supported project).

There it is. As devoted a father as Rupert was, as determined as he was to foster a great dynasty, as proud as he might be of his son (and it was a huge pride), as absolutely delighted (inner-peace-type delight) as he was to have Lachlan close, it was still a story about him. He’s not going to give up—is not capable of giving up—an iota of real control. And what control he does give up, he’ll take back as soon as he needs it.

It’s a bloody mess.

Lachlan: “Family businesses are great businesses, but they’re, they’re also fraught with difficulties, so um, so the, uh, you know, so they’re more complex than meets the eye, and in some ways they’re great and simple but…they get complicated, and again, because, um, I think because you go back to that fundamental character trait which has served Dad so well, which is forward thinking out here and always driving forward, I think he, um, misunderstood—doesn’t understand or doesn’t appreciate sometimes, or he does, but doesn’t think about how complicated they are, um—I’m not really answering the question, but, uh, don’t you know my dad’s never going to die?”

The curious thing, the unexpected thing, the thing that doesn’t happen in such a story, was that the son upped and resigned. Other than the fact that his sister Elisabeth had also a few years before been given a similar back of the hand, this really seldom happens in dynastic settings. In dynasties, you get heirs who are squashed or denuded, but you don’t much get resignations. What’s more, Lachlan, like Elisabeth, gave this up without having any money. Until recently, the old man had carefully held that card.

And yet here, in the old man’s defense, is the other elemental point: If he tried to hold them and dominate them, he also apparently raised them to be able to say
Fuck you
.

The exit couldn’t have been more painful for both father and son. Not only was the father embarrassed, but it showed his relative corporate vulnerability—Chernin and Ailes made life difficult for Lachlan and openly took credit for pushing him out. What’s more, the father lost his closest confidant as well as his perfect dynastic dream.

But never mind. The Murdochs are sentimental only up to a point.

Before his chair was cold, Lachlan was eclipsed in his father’s, and certainly in the company’s, estimation by his brother James, who had been hounding his back since childhood. In the blink of an eye, Lachlan went from the chosen one to the fallen one. Harsh.

And then there was the issue of having no money. Oh, Lachlan had cash flow—his payout from News Corp. was certainly generous. He didn’t want for relocation expenses to Australia and an appropriate gilded exile lifestyle. But he didn’t have enough money to be somebody else. To make himself into something other than Murdoch’s son. It has become one of Lachlan’s own parenting mantras: When
his
kids turn eighteen, he’s giving them personal control of their dough.

It is for him, then, a significant development that the sensitive trust issue with his half siblings was settled with $150 million pay-outs. Because at the same time his father is considering whether the
Wall Street Journal
might not be a strategic way to bring him back into the fold, Lachlan is finally in a position to make other plans.

And he’s not telling his father—or at least he’s sharing as little as possible. And driving his father crazy in the process.

When Lachlan finally phones his father in early January 2008 to tell him he is looking to do a deal, Murdoch says he is left with the understanding that Lachlan is buying the
Bulletin,
a serious and unprofitable newsmagazine in Australia that was propped up by the goodwill of Kerry Packer until his death in 2005. “A great magazine,” Murdoch tells me after speaking to Lachlan. “It’s not something he will get rich on, but he’s hoping it will give him a bit of a presence there.”

In fact, Lachlan’s larger plan is to go into business with Jamie Packer, whom he seems to admire for being truly Australian and actually having control of his family and fortune, and with SPO Partners in San Francisco, which has made a name financing deals for the children of moguls. The idea is to get himself his own media empire in Australia by gaining control, in a leveraged $3.3 billion deal, of a company that has stakes in broadcast, satellite, and publishing companies.

As Murdoch starts to get inklings of what his son is planning, he dispatches James to find out what the hell is going on. James reports that the deal involves huge debt and would only give Lachlan minority stakes in media assets (many of which turn out to be businesses that News Corp., with its minority investments, technically has first dibs on).

There are tense phone calls between the father and first son.

“It’s just a deal and he’s not a deal person,” the father fumes. “He’s a very, very good executive. He works hard. He makes good judgments of people; people who work for him love him. I’ve been urging him, ‘Get something to run.’”