It’s actually handily preyed upon by all sorts of outsiders. After Murdoch, there’s his nemesis, Robert Maxwell, the Czech; there’s Conrad Black, that other would-be Murdoch, a Canadian; Tiny Rowland, of a German father interned during World War II; Mohamed Al Fayed, an Egyptian; and then, later, the Russian billionaires. Compared to this bunch, you can begin to make the case that, relatively, Murdoch’s a proper gentleman. And yet, he similarly offends upper-middle-class sensibilities. All of these guys are opportunistically feeding on the passive, depressed British body. And while they are allowed to feed—pretty much gorge—they are still regarded with contempt, mockery, and condescension. They can have money, but they can’t have standing (until they ultimately take that too).
In London, as an Australian, Murdoch is marked as particularly uppity, unsuitable, and not serious. He makes bumptious and arrogant noises about buying the Mirror, Britain’s greatest tabloid. When he’s rebuffed by its owner, IPC, he starts buying shares in the parent company—although nobody seems to take this as much of a threat. He’s merely obnoxiously calling attention to himself.
And yet, the obnoxiousness has a certain value. He so insistently and loudly expresses his interest in buying into Fleet Street that one of his bankers puts him on to the News of the World, which, right away, Murdoch becomes desperate to buy.
His immediate interest in the News of the World—a ridiculous, almost campy British Sunday paper whose specialty was sexual perversity of a particularly English kind (spanking), crime, and scandal—suggests two things: that newspapers did not necessarily mean news to him but rather theater and spectacle, and that the rather priggish Murdoch would fit his tastes to what was for sale (and what he could buy).
The News of the World has been run for nearly a hundred years by the Carr family. At its height, in 1950, as a pre-television diversion in a postwar Britain dying for diversion, NoW had a circulation of 8.5 million; by 1968, when it comes to Murdoch’s attention, it is down to 6 million. For sixteen years, the paper has been run by Sir William Carr, who, at the earliest possible hour for lunch, walks the few blocks from the NoW headquarters on Bouverie Street, just off Fleet Street, to the Savoy Grill, where he stays late. Even with circulation dropping, the share price falling, and Sir William in his cups, the family thinks its position is unassailable. Sir William’s family owns 27 percent of the voting shares, and Sir William’s cousin, Professor Derek Jackson, owns another 25 percent.
The professor, however, tired of his relatives, decides to sell.
Enter Robert Maxwell. The Jewish, Czechoslovakian-born Maxwell (who will become known as, among other things, the “bouncing Czech”) is almost twenty years into the forty-year fraud he is perpetrating—engendering only mild suspicion—on the British media industry. He uses his company, Pergamon Press, a publisher of, among other things, specialized scientific literature (so his interest in the News of the World is even quirkier than Murdoch’s), whose value he has inflated by various financial subterfuges, to make a stock offer of £26 million for News of the World. The professor puts Maxwell into the catbird’s seat by agreeing to sell him his 25 percent.
Several things are about to happen:
Murdoch, through his courtship of Sir William Carr, and through a series of promises that he will not keep, is about to pull a jujitsu move, which, along with the broken promises, will stick to him as a kind of signature (indeed, this hoary old deal will one day be dredged up and endlessly cited by Dow Jones partisans).
He is also, to his great annoyance, for the next twenty years, about to become associated, indeed hopelessly identified, with the crooked Robert Maxwell—they are both the two interloping R.M.s of the British media business.
And he is about to become branded, through to his core, as among the most exploitive and most vulgar publishers working in the English language.
Anyway, it’s really nifty jujitsu. Murdoch, even though he’s been posturing about buying up IPC shares, doesn’t have the money to counter Maxwell’s offer. On the other hand, Sir William appears to welcome death more than he’d welcome Robert Maxwell—likely not so much because Maxwell is a crook as because he is Jewish.
Murdoch is the Protestant antidote, albeit without the necessary cash.
Murdoch, having won over the Carrs (Sir William admires Murdoch’s mother), gets them—after he threatens to walk away from the deal and leave them helplessly saddled with Maxwell—to make him, along with Sir William’s nephew Clive, co-CEO of the company. Sir William will become chairman, with a seven-year contract. The News of the World will then acquire certain assets Murdoch owns in Australia. In this semi-flimflam exchange, Murdoch’s Australian company will get 40 percent of the NoW company. His 40 percent, and Sir William’s 27 percent, means they can block a sale to Maxwell. Sensing that he holds the upper hand, before the deal closes Murdoch seriously backpedals on the agreement to be co-CEO and insists he get the role alone—and without too many options, save Maxwell, the Carrs agree.
Meanwhile, Murdoch and Maxwell are trying to gouge each other’s eyes out. Maxwell even tries to buy News Ltd. It all ends in a huge dustup at the shareholders’ meeting on January 2, 1969, with Murdoch, the presumptive heir, and Maxwell, the losing pretender, fighting bitterly to the end.
Not long after, Murdoch, who agreed not to buy any more shares in News of the World, turns around and buys part of the professor’s stake. The justification for this is—well, there is no justification. You take what you can get.
In short order, he forces Sir William to resign, and then gets rid of all the other Carrs, who, too late, understand that they were lambs led to slaughter.
Murdoch seems remarkably dense about how he’s regarded. He doesn’t pick up the signals. His press image is seldom a topic of interest for him, or even of conversation (as it is, quite often obsessively, with so many other public men). It may be that he is so temperamentally opaque that nothing gets through. Or it may be that high regard is, quite uniquely, not what he’s about. To be held in the esteem of the British public and press is the least of his ambitions. He may not even be aware of this as a measure of anything important or telling or valuable. He occupies a different world.
For an international businessman and would-be tycoon, he’s incredibly parochial. He’s just an Australian come to London to do some business. That’s how he sees himself—proudly, as an opportunist. Britain is something to take advantage of, not to be part of. In outsider fashion, he creates a little circle of cronies around him. That becomes his finite world.
Bert Hardy is one of his first retainers. Hardy has been an advertising salesman for the Mirror, the leading British tabloid. In Hardy’s view, there isn’t a sense of great strategy and big picture, and certainly not destiny, about Murdoch. At the outset, at least, he sees Murdoch as the leader of a little group of small-timers trying to keep their businesses—lame, faltering businesses at that—on their feet. It’s a patchwork; it’s ad hoc; it’s seat-of-the-pants; it’s all-consuming. It’s a condition in which no other reality can quite exist—you’re just too busy.
Murdoch, arriving in England, hasn’t bought himself marvelous cash-flow-producing prestigious brands with his new businesses, as he will in the future. This isn’t the world of private equity, of financial logic (an amount invested produces a predictable amount returned), of cutting costs to produce more free cash. It’s sweat equity. The harder you work, the quicker you respond, the cheaper you do it, the greater chance you have of making your business work. The difference here is that Murdoch, acting like the narrow-focused, tight-fisted, do-what’s-necessary manager of a gasket-making company in, say, Manchester, is acting like this in the newspaper business in London. He doesn’t get that all eyes are on him.
One of Murdoch’s early “scoops” at the News of the World is to serialize the memoirs of Christine Keeler, the call girl who six years earlier was at the center of Britain’s biggest postwar sex scandal, the Profumo Affair. The thing is, John Profumo, the disgraced defense s
ecretary, has devoted his postscandal life to charitable works and is now seen as something of a paragon of British social virtue. Thus Murdoch becomes the rude so-and-so for dredging up the whole sordid mess. The Press Council, an industry self-monitoring group, issues a public condemnation of the Keeler series. In a huff, Cardinal Heenan, Britain’s ranking Roman Catholic, pulls an article he had agreed to write for the News of the World. The Profumo Affair becomes the Murdoch Affair.
Murdoch himself—pleased to have sold more copies with the Keeler story than the News of the World usually sold—seems strangely casual and unconcerned about the backlash. Demonstrating that he’s not averse to a public role but that he has little comprehension of its nature, he uses the controversy to get himself on television.
On the air he’s artless: “I don’t agree it’s sleazy for a minute,” he says to the interviewer, David Dimbleby, in I-am-not-a-crook fashion. “Nor do I agree that it’s unfair to the man. I have the greatest sympathy with him, but it doesn’t alter the fact that everybody knows what happened. Certainly it’s going to sell newspapers.”
It is, however, his interview with David Frost, in the autumn of 1969, after publication of the Keeler article, that puts Murdoch—as well as Frost—on the map. Frost’s show has been running on London Weekend Television for three weeks when, as Frost will later say in his memoir, “it caught fire” with “an interview with a new arrival on the London scene.”
The interview is notable, on Frost’s part, for its heavy shocked-shocked tone—as though Murdoch’s even bringing up the Profumo Affair, one of the most well-covered scandals in British history, was simply outrageous behavior. It’s notable for the ferocity of Frost’s attack—sarcastic, prosecutorial, and sanctimonious. And notable for Murdoch’s implacableness: His instinct is to resist and inflame, rather than smooth and mollify. And notable because Murdoch completely bombs.
Frost himself assumes that Murdoch will sidestep the issue with some sort of mild mea culpa so that the show, which Murdoch has been convinced by Frost will be “friendly,” will focus largely on an Australian entrepreneur’s success in London.
But Murdoch, accompanied by Anna, Bert Hardy, and his PR man, John Addey, runs right into it. His own conception of himself as a hands-on, man-in-a-hurry, commercially astute guy—characteristics that in another decade or so would become de rigueur for every entrepreneur—morphs publicly into the figure of the dark, morally suspect, sadistic villain. It’s a relentless forty minutes in which Murdoch, with evident pride, takes practically full responsibility for the Keeler book excerpt.
“I certainly subedited a tremendous amount out of the book,” he proclaims.
“You have done that yourself?” confirms Frost, before holding him to account: “Since we talked on the phone this afternoon, I spent four dismal hours reading through the [Keeler] manuscript. What did you think of it when you read it?”
Thus begins perhaps the only public inquiry into Murdoch’s tabloid philosophy.
“What is your argument of positive merit?” demands Frost. And this becomes his leitmotif: making Murdoch define the good he does.
“Arguments of positive merit in this is that for the first time the whole story is being told,” Murdoch tries.
“But it’s not,” says Frost. “All these books have come out….”
Murdoch retreats. There is nothing wrong, he says, “in telling a story twice.”
“If you admit that the story has been told twice, then we are making progress,” says Frost, treating Murdoch like an errant schoolboy. “But, I mean, you started off by saying there were new things. I went through this. I combed this through very carefully and I could not find any new facts in it at all except a couple of minor personalities.”
Then, midway in the show, a taped interview with Cardinal Heenan is introduced, which Murdoch says he wasn’t told about. The prelate excoriates Murdoch on air and defends the worthiness of John Profumo’s current philanthropy.
Frost then singles out John Addey, sitting in the audience, for clapping loudly when Murdoch defends himself. “Your PR man’s going mad again. Your PR man is the only person who’s applauded—you must give him a raise.”
And then there is a point where, with narrowed eyes, Murdoch seems to focus on his position. The entire controversy has been whipped up, he says, “by members of the sort of establishment” who, he analyzes, would not otherwise “want to be seen with Mr. Profumo anywhere.”
Frost cements Murdoch’s position: “That’s an Australian view of England—it really is, you know. I mean, it doesn’t work that way anymore there, you know. It really doesn’t. I mean, of course there a lot of daft old-school ties in this country and so on, but it doesn’t work like that—the Establishment are not as well organized as that.”
“You reckon?” says Murdoch sourly.
The interview, a smash success for Frost (Frost and Murdoch actually occupy similar media places—the first of the independent media entrepreneurs), confirms everybody’s position. Murdoch, to Frost’s audience, is a disreputable, un-British interloper. Britain, to Murdoch, is ruled by a hypocritical, self-sustaining establishment—which, he clearly understands, doesn’t want him. (After the show, Anna says to Frost, who has invited the Murdochs back to the hospitality suite for a drink, “We’ve had enough of your hospitality.”) Everybody’s position, in fact, is enhanced. The establishment rises in condemnation of Murdoch, as Murdoch becomes determined to have his revenge.
Murdoch doesn’t seek to recast himself as a more sympathetic character, more appreciative of British opportunity, more observant of British protocol, more obviously a supplicant to British approval—what any PR specialist or marketing consultant might have suggested. He goes in a radical and opposite direction. He rejects cultural Britishness. His rejection reflects his ever-hardening binary philosophical position: You’re either successful, and hence significant, or you’re not successful, and hence insignificant. And at this point in time, nearly every British institution, commercial strategy, and fundamental method of economic or social problem solving is failing.
It’s a key differentiator. Most, perhaps all, of the entrepreneurs attracted to Britain and rising in it are looking for a broader kind of approval—they have major social aspirations—whereas Murdoch is only market-driven. Earlier than most, he understands what will become the central trend of the last quarter of the century: Success trumps.
What’s more, he seems, in contravention of his conservative personality, to understand that the deftest commercial strategy in Britain is the affront. From the Rolling Stones to the Sun’s bare-breasted Page 3 girls, any slap at convention in this passive if disapproving society promotes you.
And yet, he is no rebel. He certainly never sees himself as louche, rude, or disreputable, nor, as moguls are apt to, larger than life. That is part of his constant irritation with Robert Maxwell, his confounding doppelgänger, who is louche, rude, disreputable, and large (He’s “mad,” Murdoch will often say). In some sense, Murdoch is a perfect antiestablishment storm—precisely because he believes he is the establishment in his very core. He is a perfectly presentable, perfectly well-bred, exceedingly mannerly, highly competent business executive, without personal eccentricities or evident grandiosity, who owns ever more politically conservative newspapers. He isn’t trying to upset the establishment or take from it. Rather, he is its legitimate defender (to the extent that the establishment is one in his image). As his Free Church Scottish ancestors believed they were the true Church and the established church the pretenders, so for Rupert.
Storming out of the Frost show, he says to Bert Hardy about London Weekend Television, the producers of the show: “I will buy this company.” And he does.
He will note to me almost forty years later that he hasn’t spoken to Frost since.
“I feel like saying, ‘I’ll get the bastard one day,’” Murdoch will say to me, adding ruefully, “but he’ll die before I get him.”
The News of the Worl
d establishes Murdoch as a new and unnatural character in British public life. He becomes—and will continue to be for over four decades—the “Dirty Digger,” in the characterization and nomenclature of Private Eye, the satirical weekly. To be called a digger—first used to refer to the Aussie soldiers sent to their deaths by British officers at Gallipoli—is something of a compliment among Australians. In Private Eye’s usage, it becomes both a reference to News of the World’s reporting on dirty laundry and an ethnic slur.
But it is the Sun that makes Murdoch a player in Britain, and whose success makes it possible for him to show little or no interest in submitting to, as it were, British rule.
After building up, over almost twenty years, his Australian chain of more or less tabloidy newspapers (most of them more middle-market than downmarket), one of his central business perceptions is that Britain, that storied destination of ambitious Australian hacks, has only one significant daily tabloid—the Mirror—and it is putting on untabloid-like airs.
The Mirror is owned by IPC and run by the most famous publisher of the day, Hugh Cudlipp. In Murdoch’s view, as he will recall forty years later, Cudlipp has allowed himself to become corrupted; instead of focusing on being a great editor, he is more concerned about hanging out with the “champagne people.” In Murdoch’s telling, Cudlipp has committed the worst sin of newspaper proprietors: He’s turned his back on the working stiffs by trying to take the paper upmarket—and is failing dismally. The Mirror was made the biggest-selling paper in postwar Britain by Harry Guy Bartholomew, who, in Murdoch’s encomium, is “a great journalist,” meaning not a great finder of facts but a great packager, showman, and drinker (it makes you a greater packager and showman if you can do this and drink prodigiously at the same time). “He’d be standing in God knows whose bar from about three in the afternoon and have proofs sent to him,” Murdoch will gleefully recall to me. “They had to go to press at four in the afternoon to get the papers to Scotland and everywhere. But he was a great journalist. He was out at the bar, reading these pages and he’d throw them back and say, ‘Put the fucking picture spread back in.’”
The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch Page 14
