Rupert Murdoch’s Poisoned Dynasty
Gabriel Sherman’s new book Bonfire of the Murdochs is full of juice.
I once asked the legendary Hollywood producer Sam Spiegel what the greatest challenge of making the epic film Lawrence of Arabia was. He replied, “not getting overwhelmed by the sand.” There’s a similar hazard with Rupert Murdoch. To lumber through the financial minutiae of seven decades of dominance and predation by the world’s most rampant media mastodon is a task better left to biographers who can bear it. The great benefit of Gabriel Sherman’s new book, Bonfire of the Murdochs, is its brevity, 256 pages. It allows him to lay bare patterns of ruthlessness repeated over and over again. For Murdoch, Sherman writes, “promises were like inconvenient facts; fungible when they got in the way of profits.”
Sherman homes in tight on the dynastic feud surrounding which of the warring Murdoch kids would control Rupert’s global media empire after his death. An “irrevocable” trust established at the time of his divorce from his second wife, Anna, gave each of them, Liz, Lachlan, James, and his daughter from his first marriage, Prudence, voting parity. That ultimately jeopardized solidifying Murdoch’s hard-right influence expressed in his media assets, especially Fox News, because only Lachlan shares his paleo-political point of view. But, as we come to see, nothing in Murdoch world is “irrevocable.”
The book opens in September 2024 with the cinematic scene of a convoy of black SUVs, bearing Rupert’s riven, middle-aged heirs, snaking through the Nevada desert “like a funeral procession” to a Reno courthouse, where a judge would determine if the now shuffling 93-year-old patriarch could commit his final act of family hurt: blow up the trust, and hand the empire to just one of his children.
Sherman’s competition in telling this story is the hit HBO series Succession, which had so many elements of the real-life narrative that Murdoch’s ex-wife, Jerry Hall, had to agree in their divorce settlement not to help the showrunners with plot points. But Sherman’s Murdoch could not be more different from Succession’s roaring profanity machine, Logan Roy. Murdoch mostly confines bravado to the balance sheet. He’s the media world’s great white shark, with a slight trail of blood at the corner of his thin mouth. He only resembles Logan in that (marvelous) moment in Succession, when the fictional patriarch tells his distractible kids, “You are not serious people.”
Rupert is serious people. And his kids? They try. Each is doomed to play out archetypal roles forged by their father’s quest for media dominion: the favorite son, tattooed Lachlan with the MAGA swagger; the prodigal son James, once arty and tortured, now smooth as a recent Stanford GSB grad in a Palo Alto pitch; Liz, the high-strung dynamo daughter who, like all female heirs, has had to fight for her place in the power hierarchy; their marginalized half-sister Prudence, who was so devastated when Murdoch didn’t mention her alongside the other three in an interview about his succession, she called her father and screamed down the phone at him. Afterwards, he sent her a bunch of flowers “bigger than [a] sofa.”
The legal fight in Reno was the inevitable conclusion of the toxic dynamic that had shaped their four lives. Whatever corporate title Murdoch bestowed on his children was always their measure of how much he loved them. And how much he loved them was always contingent on how well they fulfilled their allotted role on his power checkerboard.
Is This a Dagger which I See Before Me?
Sherman’s gallop through the back story of Murdoch’s rise is an exuberant chronicle of seduction and betrayal. Rupert’s superpower, the author suggests, is that he never looks back. He has no guilt and no fear. In business, this allowed him to bet the store and win, time and time again. He has an endless capacity for self-forgiveness and a propulsive embrace of moral expedience.
I saw this up close in the early eighties, when Murdoch, known only as a scurrilous tabloid huckster, courted my late husband, Harry Evans, the acclaimed Sunday Times editor, as part of his campaign to acquire Fleet Street’s crown jewels, Times Newspapers, offering solemn pledges to the board to preserve editorial independence. He swiftly trashed those promises. Following thirteen months of meddling, Rupert fired Harry the morning after the funeral of Harry’s father, right after penning him a sentimental condolence letter about the precious bond of a father and son. “A good father and son relationship is one of the best experiences in life.” (Sherman tells this story with brio and even adds some details I did not know.)
Murdoch had taken the same approach with Clay Felker, the legendary founder of New York magazine. Felker’s mistake was to confide to his pal Rupert that he was having trouble with his magazine’s board. Murdoch promptly went behind his back to buy this juicy prestige asset, then forced Felker out. Clay vowed to fight him “tooth and nail,” to which Murdoch deadpanned, “Teeth and nails are fine. But it’s money that wins this kind of scrap.” Harry once said that Murdoch’s middle name should be Macbeth: invite him to dinner, and he murders the host.
It’s impossible not to wonder if there is something Oedipal going on in all the serial patricide, later played out with his own kids in reverse. Sherman has insights. Murdoch may have written to Harry about the precious bond of a father’s love. But the truth, in Sherman’s version, is that Rupert had a crap relationship with his own. For all of his later hagiography about his august father, Australian newspaper magnate Sir Keith Murdoch, his dad had little time for the young Rupert and always treated him as a disappointment. And his mother, the sainted Dame Elisabeth, grande dame of Australian society, was no picnic either. Sherman writes that she taught her son to swim as a young boy by tossing him in the pool of a cruise ship. “I had to dog-paddle to the side, and I was screaming,” Rupert has recalled without rancor.
That Darwinian filial moment is replayed when Sherman describes how, in 2000, Rupert installed the callow 29-year-old princeling Lachlan as Deputy COO of News Corp, throwing him into the cage fight of corporate politics. Lachlan was soon eaten alive by Fox News tyrant Roger Ailes (who, Sherman writes, spread fake rumors that Lachlan was gay) and News Corp COO, Peter Chernin. “It wasn’t the most emotionally intelligent way for Dad to handle it,” Liz told journalist Sarah Ellison. “He doesn’t really have the tools to say he’s sorry.”
He wasn’t sorry. Rupert seemed not to wonder why the only times his kids prospered were when they were out of his oversight – Lachlan in Sydney, where he set up his own investment firm (he notched some failures but also some highly lucrative wins), James in Hong Kong for a successful run as CEO of Rupert’s Star TV, Liz in London, building her production company Shine that cranked out hits like MasterChef. Heady with her independent achievement, she was thrilled by the validation from her father when News Corp bought Shine for $670 million. It was also a trap. Sherman reports that Rupert had promised her a seat on the News Corp board and told her that she was his preferred successor. But once she signed the deal, he stopped talking to her. “She was heartbroken,” a friend recalled.
Murdoch’s approach to parenting was carnivorous – overpromote the kids and blame them when they failed. At the end of 2007, just when James was proving himself an able CEO of BSkyB, Murdoch elevated him to the role of chairman as well as overseeing News Corp’s businesses in Europe and Asia. That put James in charge of all his father’s British newspaper titles, even though he had no affinity for the passé world of print. It also meant James was at the helm in London when the News of the World phone-hacking scandal broke. The revelation that breaking into the voicemails – not only of royal and celebrity phones but also of crime victims – had been carried out on an industrial scale, and then covered up at the highest level, was an existential corporate crisis. No one was less equipped to be drowned in the sewage of tabloid corruption than squeaky-clean James Murdoch, with his MBA-speak and liberal sensitivities. As the company imploded, James persuaded his always pridefully combative father to close his beloved News of the World. Sherman tells us that Murdoch never forgave James for cornering him into this panicky move. In a hideous Hunger Games-like scene, Murdoch instructed Liz to walk down the hall and fire her brother. She did, and the siblings didn’t speak for years. Sherman reports that Liz later said, “It’s one of the greatest regrets of my life.”
Jesus Christ. It’s a wonder all three of the Murdoch kids are not in a psych ward. And we haven’t even talked about their father’s marriages. Rupert left his starter wife, Patricia, whom Dame Elisabeth always considered downmarket, for the ladylike beauty Anna Torv, mother of Liz, Lachlan, and James. After thirty-two years of white-toast marriage, it was assumed Anna was a keeper. But then we enter what I think of as Rupert’s Viagra era. His friends were stunned when, at the age of 68, the gnarly old gargoyle dumped Anna for 30-year-old Wendi Deng, the hot, go-getting Chinese-born Star TV employee, who caught his eye in Hong Kong. Despite the iconic act of devotion when she smacked the man who launched a shaving cream pie at Murdoch during a phone hacking hearing, he shed Wendi after 14 years (and two daughters) because of rumors — likely spread by Roger Ailes — of infidelity. (Wendi told me she was first aware she was being divorced when her phone started to blow up during a school play at Spence in New York.) On to wife number four, Mick Jagger’s ex, Jerry Hall. With Rupert now a ripe 92 years old, it was reasonable to expect the marriage to end with the still glamorous Jerry as a widow, not a divorcee. But, in 2022, and after six years, she, too, was fired from the marital bed, this time in a terse email that concluded, “My New York lawyer will be contacting yours immediately.” And yes, there is a wife number five: the low-key but well-connected Russian former scientist Elena Zhukova, who was 67 to Rupert’s 93 when they married in June 2024.
With all this marital mayhem, it was lucky that the dynastic interests of the three kids by Anna were intact in the “irrevocable” trust, right? Wrong. After all the years jockeying to run his empire, Murdoch’s last epic deal sold it out from under them. Offloading 20th Century Fox to Disney for the top-of-the-market price of $71 billion in 2019, just before the streaming wars began, was classic Rupert strategic brilliance. As always, the kids were played off against each other. James favored the deal because he thought it meant escape from his father in the guise of a big leadership role at Disney. (Not happenin’) Lachlan, meanwhile, was castrated, his great prospects now a rump news company, albeit dominated by the profit-gushing Trumpian mouthpiece Fox News. Everyone knew that James and Liz despised Fox and itched to exercise their voting rights to ditch it to the highest bidder, as soon as Rupert died.
The Fox Frankenstein
Which brings us back to the courthouse in Reno. Is anyone surprised that the great white shark prevailed once again, winning the right to exercise his will beyond the grave and install Lachlan as his corporate heir? This time, betting the store meant the disintegration of the Murdoch family. But it’s hard to shed tears. Whatever their moral posturing about Fox News, the other Murdoch children enjoyed its spoils; their price to walk away was $1.1 billion apiece. “Lachlan got the kingdom,” Sherman writes, “James, Liz, and Pru got their freedom, ” and Rupert “was still in the game.”
The only tears to be shed are for the rest of us, who have seen how Fox’s degradation of truth created the monstrous phenomenon of Donald Trump and stoked the partisan hatred that has split America. In seven decades of despoilment, it’s the steepest price yet paid for Murdoch’s pathology of power.
Want to hear more? Please join me in person or on livestream when I interview Gabriel Sherman about the Murdochs at the 92Y in NYC on Thursday, February 5, at 8pmET. You can get tickets here. Or I’ll be posting our talk here on Fresh Hell the next day.
Absolutely brilliant, from the lede "not getting overwhelmed by the sand" to the perfect phrasings ("gnarly old gargoyle). Tina Brown goes from strength to strength--the best read in (on?) Substack, or anywhere.
If there is anyone who should've been deportee number one, stripped of his US citizenship, and sent back to the penal colony from where he arose, this is the individual. He represents the worst of all America can be, and some have become. Few in America have played into the hands of our adversaries better than this fool. His out of control lust for power using Freedom of the Press as a dagger through the heart of the ideal, "We the People in Order to Form a more Perfect Union," is unparalleled in liberal democracies here and abroad. He has taken the words of Thomas Paine in Common Sense, "It is not in our numbers , but in our unity that our strength lies," and tried to butcher them into oblivion. Murdoch, The Butcher of Perth. #Deport Murdoch