It may be that the worst thing that can happen to a journalist is about to happen to Lippman. His long-term paper is being pursued by a man whom he has written about in derisive, cruel, scathing, innuendo-laden terms. Even worse: He has written about the man’s wife in derisive, cruel, scathing, innuendo-laden terms.
In all the bad press coverage of Rupert Murdoch over so many decades, nothing has hurt him so much as the piece by Lippman and two colleagues that appeared on the front page of the Journal on November 1, 2000. Charting Wendi Deng’s path to Rupert Murdoch, it was an extraordinary piece of journalism about ambition, guile, and the special abilities of predatory women—specifically, predatory Chinese women. In Lippman’s telling, Wendi Deng was the yellow peril.
What’s more, it is believed by some at News Corp. that Lippman holds a stash of compromising (as they say) pictures of nineteen-year-old Wendi taken by her fifty-year-old, soon-to-be first husband.
Lippman knows if Murdoch is going to be the new boss he better be as far from the Wall Street Journal as possible.
RUPERT AND WENDI
Of all the office affairs in history, Murdoch’s may be the biggest cliché, both silly and sweet. This monster, this control freak, this cold bastard, is as blissfully helpless in the face of a determined woman of lowly rank as any lonely, erotically deprived, death-fearing man would be.
To the business world in 1996, his marriage to Anna has long appeared elemental to his success and identity. Anna, who seemed to change her outfit six times a day, gets the Aussie bloke who so often looks like an unmade bed to act at least a little like royalty—although never quite enough (to her taste, anyway).
Barry Diller, who saw them frequently in Los Angeles during the eighties and early nineties, will say, “Rupert and Anna are a modern love story…were a modern love story.”
By the mid-nineties, however, Rupert and Anna are barely speaking. News Corp. executives start to notice that they live in separate parts of the big Beverly Hills house. “They passed like shadows in the night,” one former News Corp. executive will say, adding that he believes that, in the seven or eight months before Rupert met Wendi, “he never spoke a word” to Anna.
It’s a portrait of a solitary existence: He gets up at four or five in the morning and has a bowl of porridge—“A horse,” he says, “has to have its chaff”—and then after a shower and shave drives down the hill to work. He works all morning, and then goes to lunch at the Fox commissary, where every day he intently scans the menu and then every day has the same damn thing: grilled chicken, vegetables, and a Diet Coke. It’s practically a Monty Python sketch. Then he goes home at about seven and stays on the phone until bedtime at eleven.
If he’s not following this routine, he’s traveling.
China has become a sort of liberation. There’s both a messianic sense to this adventure—that he can use modern media to somehow transform China while at the same time making billions—and too the typical News Corp. ragtag, throw-it-against-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks business plan. It’s just a bunch of wild Aussies trying to make a killing (and make Rupert happy). Although, as it happens, the Aussies have so far lost several billion dollars on Rupert’s Chinese dream.
It’s one reason Wendi’s arrival at the Star TV offices in Hong Kong in 1996 is so memorable: She’s actually Chinese.
In John Lippman’s account in the Wall Street Journal, Wendi Deng is an amoral Chinese girl, without prospects, who uses sex and various manipulative skills to seize convenient opportunities—opportunities that she jettisons as soon as better opportunities become available. By dint of coldness and calculation she navigates up the social trajectory of both the United States and China to marry the world’s richest and most powerful media magnate and, by promptly producing two children, ensures herself a central position in all future dynastic developments.
There is great poetic justice in this tale, because of course the media magnate brought low by the amoral Chinese girl’s coldness and calculation and preternatural manipulative talents is himself one of the world’s most famous cold, calculated, and preternaturally manipulative sons of bitches. This daughter of a manager at a machinery factory in Guangzhou insinuates herself, in the Journal version of the story, predator-like, into the family of Jake and Joyce Cherry. Jake Cherry is, in 1987, a fifty-year-old engineer working in China. His wife, having met eighteen-year-old Wendi through their interpreter, starts helping the young girl with her English studies. Joyce Cherry returns to Los Angeles to enroll her two young children in school. Wendi and Jake, left to their own devices in Guangzhou, are shortly, according to the Journal, intertwined. Joyce will tell the Journal she eventually finds a cache of “coquettish” (in the Journal’s words) pictures of Wendi taken by her husband (these are the pictures that News Corp. officially denies exist). But before Joyce finds the smoking gun, Jake convinces Joyce that they ought to help Wendi get a student visa to the United States and, also, to invite her to stay with them in Los Angeles.
Wendi arrives in Los Angeles in February 1988. Underlining her duplicity and meretriciousness, the Journal points out that Wendi shares “a bedroom and a bunk bed” with the Cherrys’ five-year-old daughter. Anyway, evidence and emotion will out and Joyce, according to the Journal, gets wise to the situation, forcing Wendi, now a student at California State University at Northridge, out of the house. Jake soon follows her and the two marry in February 1990. But in no time at all, she moves on. “She told me I was a father concept to her, but it would never be anything else,” the Journal has Jake saying, adding, “I loved that girl.” She does, however, stay married to Jake for two years and seven months—long enough, the Journal archly notes, to get a green card.
Her next alliance, begun while she’s still involved with Jake, is with a more age-appropriate suitor named David Wolf, a businessman with an interest in China who speaks a bit of Mandarin. She’s involved with Wolf for at least the next five or six years. The Journal, with evident satisfaction, identifies a source who says that Wendi on at least one occasion referred to Wolf as her husband. The Journal allows as how, at the California State campus, she is regarded as one of the most talented students to pass through the school’s economics department. She departs California for Yale’s MBA program. The relationship with Wolf cools, leaving her free to reel in bigger fish. After her first years at Yale, she shows up for her summer internship at Star TV.
But let’s recast the story as a triumphal, even uplifting tale of pluck and achievement. She’s not Becky Sharp, she’s Pip in Great Expectations.
She’s the third child in a provincial family of average station, meaning she’s hungry most of the time in 1970s and ’80s China. Her two older sisters are away (dislocated by the forces of the Cultural Revolution). Wendi is called “number three.” A third girl, another deprivation. Her parents try again and, finally, produce a boy.
Having learned, having had to learn, how to get attention, she emerges as a young woman of uncommon directness—engaging people with great efficiency and insistence. She’s smart; she’s flirty; she knows she has to look for an advantage. She’s a young person who likes to talk to older people; she’s a young person whom older people like to talk to.
And then she meets the American family.
The Cherrys, likely in the thrall of the Chinese zeitgeist (it’s just getting under way in the late eighties), undoubtedly find her to be an energizing and beguiling young woman. She’s their discovery. Wendi, in her turn—intent on expanding her own horizons, taking pleasure in the pleasure they’re taking in her, caught up herself in the romance of the American zeitgeist—is equally smitten with them.
The fact that she’s been swept up into what is a problematic marriage, that she’s been appropriated probably in part because it is a problematic marriage, is a circumstance that only an omniscient narrator gets to see. Likely, the nineteen-year-old isn’t aware of it at all; if she does have some awareness, it’s inchoate, or in a constellation of factual and emotional varia
bles. The idea—the Wall Street Journal idea—of her as the nineteen-year-old emotional cat burglar is pure construct.
She arrives in Los Angeles as the guest of the Cherrys at least half a decade before Chinese students in America are a routine part of campus life. She speaks little English. She goes to work in a Chinese restaurant. She registers at the nearest state university campus.
Almost immediately, the Jake Cherry situation blows up. Here’s the narrow view of even the most sensitive nineteen-year-old, not to mention one remote from family, country, language: This is just my life happening to me. Obviously—judging from the story’s outcome—she takes on new roles with some ease. The new adventure begins, and she’s open to it—she gets into it, she conforms to it.
The problem may be that she romanticizes each adventure, so after the initial exhilaration, she’s bound to be disappointed. It is not craftiness and duplicity and avarice that is her character weakness but, after she cycles through a few adventures, her constant need for excitement, for drama, for change, for the new. For further opportunity.
At the same time, she’s getting educated. And because she’s naturally smart, with a type of studiousness not necessarily common to the adventurous, she’s forging another sort of narrative. While her strained personal life is going on, she’s starting to design another life, envisioning a career, understanding its direction, demands, logistics, exigencies. The adventuress begins to conceive of a different kind of adventure.
Where the Wall Street Journal assumes an imbroglio of certain moral turpitude—because we know the outsize end of the story, that makes her all the more dubious—it is both more and less dramatic to see Wendi’s progress as a set of sequential, evolving, and to some large degree random relationships. Her story, with its domestic dramas, evident personal miscalculations, thoughtlessness, and immaturity, isn’t particularly extreme or more chaotic than that of a great proportion of striving young people—she’s just traveled farther.
Indeed, having gotten a business degree from Yale, we may assume that her life is considerably less chaotic and more focused than most. She’s making her way.
It is just because, out of all the women in the world, it is she who ends up married to Rupert Murdoch that we—or the Wall Street Journal—impute Machiavellian method, and systematic amorality, to her upwardly mobile progress.
But, okay, let’s assume that there is design.
She is ambitious, after all. She understands that she has a specific market advantage: She’s a Chinese national with an American MBA.
She has an interest in power, in who’s who in the room. There are numerous stories of her at cocktail parties and other gatherings doing thumbnail descriptions of the various men and their achievements, of wittily assessing the playing field, of knowing the gossip. On the one hand this is avariciousness, on the other astuteness. Vulgarity or discrimination.
It’s logic as well as design that takes her after her first year in business school to a summer job with News Corp.’s Star TV in Hong Kong. She is, of course, an extraordinarily good candidate, given her background and education.
Almost immediately she distinguishes herself at Star. She’s a presence. A sui generis presence. She has instant stature because she’s a Chinese woman who behaves like an American woman. A Chinese woman who isn’t in the least bit indirect. Every man in the office has a Wendi crush or fixation. She’s both a breath of fresh air and an office fantasy. She’s mascot and fetish. She’s aware of her power if not exactly in control of it. She speaks constantly, has opinions about everything, eschews self-editing. She has no accurate sense of her place—or, anyway, no compunction about ignoring it. She’s the one person able to turn the hierarchies of a Chinese office—and even an American company in China assumes such hierarchies—into a level playing field.
Likewise, she’s in love with the office. She’s not eager to go back to Yale, would rather begin her career there and then. Several would-be paternal figures in the Star office take credit for sending her back for her degree. She’s not only the office infatuation but its project. The great Chinese hope. People want her to succeed. There’s a vested interest in her.
“To be honest, a lot of the young Chinese executives we were developing,” Star CEO Gary Davey, one of those who encouraged her to go back to Yale, will later recall, “often lacked the courage and initiative that it takes to persistently pursue an opportunity. Very smart people, but there’s a natural shyness to them, whereas Wendi, I mean, she had no fear of anything.”
A year later, in 1997, her degree in hand, she’s back. She’s just a junior staffer. And yet she’s almost immediately elevated (well before Rupert elevates her). There are guilty explanations about her rise.
It is obvious then, when the boss suddenly announces he’s coming to town and needs to be accompanied, needs a guide and translator and aide, that it will be Wendi (in a classic setup, the regular translator is away from the office). She’ll make the office seem sharp, top of the class, cool—indeed, sexy. She’ll make everybody else look good.
So, the circumstance: Rupert, bogged down in a long and tortuous negotiation to get a satellite network off the ground in Japan, decides on the spur of the moment he wants to go to Shanghai and see what he can get going there. He calls Gary Davey and tells him to get to Shanghai too. It turns out that Davey and the other top people from Star are in Delhi. But Rupert still wants to go and needs a guide, and so Davey says, “All right, I’ve got an MBA for you. She’s really smart.” And Chinese. He calls Wendi and says, “There’s somebody coming to Hong Kong who you’ve got to take to Shanghai. It’s Rupert Murdoch.”
Davey later narrates, “That’s when the flame was ignited. To what extent it was consummated, that we can have no idea of.”
One of the richest and most powerful men on earth, believing he’s about to age out of his reason for being—at the same time he’s looking desperately, inchoately, and not necessarily successfully for new worlds to conquer (China, the heavens, mortality itself)—finds himself with a young woman. And not just a young woman, but a young Chinese woman with impeccable American credentials, who, in addition, is fearless, beautiful, flirtatious, and fundamentally interested in exactly what he’s interested in: power, media, China, getting from point A to point B in this world.
In fact, they talk about business all the time. He’s suddenly not feeling guilty about talking about business all the time. He’s sexy to somebody exactly because he’s talking about business (Anna, on the other hand, has always wanted him to be cultured). And this is a smart person—she’s sparring with him; she keeps his attention. It’s all so immensely exhilarating to a stuffy old singlet-wearing man. (Let us pause for a moment to consider the first moment when Wendi sees the singlet come off.)
What are the chances? The sense of this being a long shot increases the feeling that a kind of miracle has happened. Soul mates and all. As in so many other points in his life when all is hanging in the balance, the game seems to change in Rupert’s favor.
There’s something else: Rupert likes a woman with a status discrepancy. Each of his wives to date has been an unequal match—the airline stewardess, and then the office intern. Rupert has Henry Higgins aspects.
At the Star offices, it will be a moment for great marveling and sheepishness—and disbelief. Indeed, one morning Rupert calls Davey, who has no idea that a relationship has begun—or even that Rupert and Wendi have seen each other after the Shanghai trip—and says, in a businesslike manner, “You’re probably wondering now why Wendi isn’t back from vacation. Well, she’s with me and chances are she won’t be coming back to Star TV.” (It’s the stuff of romance novels.)
He may not handle it worse than most other departing spouses at home, but it’s not good. He denies, he prevaricates, he blocks from his consideration the hurt he’s caused or is about to cause. He leaves a confused and devastated family. It is at first, before Wendi’s entrance, just a pained, sad, inexplicable situation, with adult childr
en trying to soothe, mediate, mend, understand. It’s a long-married couple whose grievances, till now held mostly in check, are suddenly heated. Anna’s hurt; he’s hurt. Nobody’s speaking. The whole situation, beyond logic or apparent reason, is unraveling quickly.
First, however, they have to tell his mother. They each go to Cruden Farm and take long walks in the garden with Dame Elisabeth—unaware of Wendi—trying vainly to act as marriage counselor.
Suddenly, there are separate residences. News Corp. legal is going round the clock. And then there is the strange, final announcement through Liz Smith, the New York Post gossip columnist, that Mr. and Mrs. Rupert Murdoch…amicably…
After thirty-one years of a marriage during which there is practically nobody who suggests he’s anything more than a suitably repressed, preoccupied, workaholic, henpecked husband, he’s gone.
He continues to deny that there’s anybody else. He will continue, officially, with great difficulty, to deny that Wendi precipitated the split.
Two months after the split from Anna, and three weeks after his daughter Prudence and her family accompany her forlorn father on a sailing holiday where he keeps slipping off to take his behind-closed-door phone calls, he calls Prue, as he’ll call the three other kids, and says, “I just wanted to tell you—hmmm…humm…ahhhh—I’ve met a nice Chinese lady.”
Prue, in the kitchen, gets off the phone and races upstairs, eyes blazing, shouting to her husband, Alasdair: “My God, you won’t believe it!”
Given the billions at stake, the influence at issue, and the dynastic preparations that have been made, not to mention a certain antediluvian and strong-willed matriarch—Dame Elisabeth—who will not be so easily appeased, this is a domestic cock-up of epic proportions.
While such action may seem radically out of character, this is mostly because it involves a woman. Otherwise, it’s very much in character. He closes things off. If he has to sell a business, it’s gone and forgotten. When it comes time to fire a close associate, it doesn’t leave an emotional hole. If he fastens on some new notion or approach or point of view or direction or opportunity, he doesn’t look back. It is, in fact, as though he has some short-circuited or retarded historical mechanism: He instantly loses interest in the past.
The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch Page 34
