Excerpted from The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch, by Michael Wolff, to be published in December by Broadway Books; © 2008 by the author.
As cautionary tales go, you could hardly find a more hothouse example of families gone awry, of genetic dumbing down, and of the despairing results of idle hands than newspaper families.
The Bancrofts, the old-line Wasp family that had controlled The Wall Street Journal for more than 100 years, had sunk into terminal dysfunction. This was News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch’s opportunity. Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, had long coveted above all else two things: The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Now, finally, in the spring of 2007, having studied the Bancroft family’s weaknesses, he believed one of them could be his.
Another benefit of dealing with the hapless Bancroft family was that it made him feel so much better about the dysfunction in his own family (dysfunction is a modish word that irritates him—he uses it only because his children say it so often). The Murdochs, who have had their problems, are not, he is confident, heading in the Bancrofts’ direction—not yet.
The Bancrofts were an unwieldy lot of cousins who hardly knew one another and who had too much money and not enough ambition—and certainly not enough interest in the business that had been left them.
The Murdochs, on the other hand, as steeped in newspapers as any family—Rupert’s father, born in 1885, had been the most famous newspaper publisher in Australia during the first half of the 20th century; his son, the most famous newspaper publisher in the world during the second half—were in pretty good shape. Despite a few operatic meltdowns within the family and several anni horribiles provoked by a new wife, Wendi Deng, 38 years his junior, and new children, Rupert Murdoch had produced a next generation that, he believed, could be counted on. Whatever he did, whatever Anna, his second wife, might say about his absenteeism when his children were growing up—and Homeric it could be—he had done something right. Or Anna had done something right. Or good genes were good genes.
Prudence
Prue, Murdoch’s daughter with his first wife, Patricia Booker, is the only one of his children not directly competing for his business affections. But her husband, Alasdair MacLeod, is a ranking News Corp. executive, so Prue is hardly neutral about the fate of her father’s company. What’s more, her children, James, born in 1991, Angus, born in 1993, and Clementine, born in 1996, are the oldest grandchildren, which strategically positions them in the dynastic stream.
Still, Prue, at 50, feels free enough to have morphed into the official Murdoch-family wing nut. She gets away with saying what the others won’t, even things that the others won’t think, and she takes the various family members much less seriously than they do themselves. This involves, not least of all, seeing her three oldest half-siblings—Elisabeth, Lachlan, and James—as, each in his or her way, master-race prototypes. Where Prue is short, plump, unfashionable, and rather disheveled, her half-siblings are each striking, precise, intense—almost too good to be true, at least at first glance. (Both of her half-brothers married models, each of whom bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the boys’ mother, Anna—striking, precise, intense—and hence to their sister Elisabeth, who is her mother’s clone.)
Prue’s mother, Patricia, an airline hostess and sometime department-store model, whom Murdoch met and married in Adelaide in 1956, was always regarded by Rupert’s mother as less than she should have been. When he divorced her, in 1966, she married a bad-news Swiss jet-setter by the name of Freddie Maeder, with whom she began a partying life (funded with her former husband’s money), often leaving Prue behind. When Rupert marries Anna Torv, in 1967 (she was not on the face of it a much better match in his mother’s view—an Estonian Catholic is not exactly a catch in Anglo-Protestant-centric Melbourne), nine-year-old Prue begs to live with them. In 1968 the three of them move together to London, where Murdoch acquires first the News of the World, the 4.5-million-circulation scandal sheet, then the down-market Sun, which becomes the most influential tabloid in Britain, and then, in 1980, The Times of London, the country’s most prestigious paper.
Prue is the difficult stepchild to a pregnant stepmother—and it’s all pretty much downhill from there. Her schooling is a disaster (Murdoch, trying to be an Australian egalitarian, first sends Prue to a London state school—she doesn’t last a term), her behavior often incorrigible, and her relationship with her stepmother at the very least strained and often much worse. In 1974, with three new children, the Murdochs move to New York. Prue, at 15, is plunged into the Manhattan private-school world at Dalton. She’s way out of her element among the New York rich kids.
She’s one of the few Dalton students who don’t go on to college. Murdoch, at this point, still doesn’t see girls as having much of anything to do with what he does, certainly not as part of the future of News Corp. In fact, the only job Prue ever gets at News Corp. is a girl’s job—when she returns to London, she’s briefly a researcher at the magazine in his Sunday tabloid, News of the World.
At 26, she makes what seems to be a favorable marriage to Crispin Odey, who will go on to be the highest-earning hedge-fund manager in London. But a year later they separate.
In 1989, Prue meets and marries Alasdair MacLeod, a Scotsman who shortly goes to work for Murdoch. Prue is strongly against Alasdair’s going into the family business—but Murdoch offers him a job behind her back.
She continues to feel like the stepsister and outsider child—without a place in her father’s empire—and her resentments come to a head in 1999 when she’s plastered on the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald under the headline forgotten daughter. Still furious about remarks her father made at a press conference in 1997 in which he’d referred to “my three children,” Prue agreed to sit for the only interview she’d ever given up to that point. In the interview she recounted how, after her father’s public slight, she had had “the biggest row I’ve ever had with my father. I rang up, I screamed at him, I hung up. He was very upset. He then sent the biggest bunch of flowers—it was bigger than a sofa—and two clementine trees.”
The interview appears the day of her half-brother Lachlan’s wedding to Australian supermodel Sarah O’Hare. Prue, who hasn’t seen the interview, arrives at Cavan—the 40,000-acre sheep station outside of Canberra that Murdoch bought in the 1960s—for the wedding and can’t understand why everyone is so tense.
It must be “your fault,” she says to her father, telling him it has to do with his separation from Anna, after 31 years, announced the spring before.
“It has nothing to do with me,” Murdoch says. “It’s your fault.”
“You’ve got Wendi holed up in a hotel in Sydney, and you’ve got Anna here hating you. Why is it my fault?” (At Anna’s request, Wendi Deng hadn’t been invited.)
“Did you not see the front page? You’ve upset them all.”
And yet she is in some ways the child Murdoch is most comfortable with—or at least the child who is least afraid of him. Within the company in Australia, people remark that she treats her father more like a husband—an irritating husband she has to beat some sense into. For her part, she finds it just slightly unsettling that he regularly mistakes her for one of his sisters.
Indeed, Prue is the only real ally he has in the family when Wendi comes into the picture (still, she tells an Australian documentary-film maker, he’s a “dirty old man”). This comes close to costing her: during the divorce negotiations, Anna, who is trying to guarantee that neither Rupert’s new wife nor possible new children will gain an interest in News Corp., tries to assign Prue a lesser position in the family trust. Her father, however, insists on her equal place.
Elisabeth
Murdoch’s ideas about girls seem to change substantially with Elisabeth, born 10 years after Prue. This is partly about the broad cultural change that’s happening as Elisabeth is growing up. But it’s also that Elisabeth is growing up in New York. She goes to the Brearley School, where Murdoch is hardly the only billionaire father and where Elisabeth is not even the most notable heiress.
