Autumn of the Moguls

by Michael Wolff

  The media class is not usually so ambivalent about success, but success, no matter how much you’ve had, becomes something else when it’s coupled with failure—e.g., Talk.

  Psychoanalyzing the backlash, we’re bound to get to the formulation that it’s not about them; it’s about us.

  There was an obvious codependence. We were each other’s enablers. It was an age of excess, of overweening ambition, of greed, and phoniness, and sucking up, and the glorification of strange, obnoxious, preening, uninteresting people. And Tina Brown and, by association, Harry Evans, had the misfortune of coming to stand for all this (not to mention having made us participate in it).

  I wonder, too, if the backlash doesn’t also say something about the general-interest-magazine business. Tina’s New Yorker and Vanity Fair may have been the last gasp of the magazine as social chronicle. By spending huge amounts of money and through constant vainglorious acts of self-promotion, and by creating a subculture of editorial dirty pool (if you could help the magazine, or Tina and Harry, you were stroked; if you could neither help nor hurt the magazine or them, you were fodder), she supported a dying genre. Everyone in our business cheered her on, hoping out of self-interest that she would succeed, but when she didn’t (and, I might argue, she couldn’t), we all distanced ourselves from her embarrassing and desperate acts.

  Likewise, she helped import to New York, and the constricting publishing business, an English sensibility. Because in the publishing world there is so little room to maneuver and there are so few opportunities, it was fertile ground for the development of a class-based, hierarchical structure, which she at Vanity Fair and the New Yorker and Harry as editor in chief of Random House reigned over. In this system, you’re always kissing up to the people above you, but at the least sign of weakness (places in the firmament being so scarce), you rip them apart. The fact that she ran three magazines that competed with each other only increased the strain. Indeed, the author of Tina and Harry is a Vanity Fair writer; the perception, certainly at Talk, was that when Tina went down, Vanity Fair and Graydon Carter went up.

  Then there’s the Hollywood thing, which was the magic potion Tina sprinkled on a magazine (and which fit the spirit of a self-aggrandized era).

  Her father, George Brown, was an English movie producer; she came of age when the movies were the hottest sector of media (and also had a foreigner’s awe of Hollywood); she transposed British class hierarchies to America by elevating Hollywood celebrities. But now, as the result of various cultural transformations (for instance, new technology, which Tina has seemed really dim about), the movies have become peripheral and disposable (certainly Talk magazine was a cavalcade of celebrities one could care less about); it’s a bottom-of-the-class business. It isn’t where the heat is; nobody takes movies seriously anymore. Hollywood, which once made Tina look hip and powerful, now made her look craven and silly—and like a dumbo for not getting that it’s so over with.

  Ironically, Tina and Harry turned out to be bad at playing the media game (doubly ironic because they had the game fixed for so long—no one would say anything bad about Harry and Tina because everyone was on their payroll or invite list).

  They had, it turns out, no appreciation of the rhythms of thrust and parry. Bad press sticks to some people (and then increases geometrically), while other people brush it off. The process of brushing it off involves a certain level of self-confidence—you have to be able to not take it seriously. Whereas Tina is always chewing over her bad clips, calling reporters and attempting to recast quotes, having friends call reporters, deploying PR agents. And Harry, while in one life a crusading journalist, is in another an enthusiastic libel plaintiff.

  They wound easily. They’re thin-skinned.

  Worse, they set themselves up. You don’t throw the party of the century to launch a fledgling magazine—I mean, anybody who knows anything about managing expectations will tell you this.

  It is the self-confidence issue, though, that may go to the heart of the matter. To some degree, I wonder if this doesn’t have to do with a structural anomaly of their success. Tina, especially, achieved massive notoriety of the kind associated with the biggest payday (hence engendering the most resentments). She should have been rich. She became an international brand name. But because she was, in reality, just an employee (and at Talk, despite her best efforts to become a mogul, continued to be just an employee) and because her successes, at least from a profit-and-loss standpoint, have been mostly illusory, she never made her fuck-you money.

  And the money is where the confidence and the respect come from—it redeems you. Not having the money means you’re just a sucker. Which is, in essence, the social rule propounded most forcefully and unforgivingly by Tina Brown.

  20

  AND STILL

  MORE

  COCKTAILS

  “You’re everywhere!” Tina Brown said to me, moving from the dark, ornate outer room to the inner room where dinner was to be served.

  “No, you’re everywhere,” was my weak rejoinder.

  Tina’s estimation of me stung. I had to wonder if being here meant I’d achieved a certain carte blanche: If there was a media party, I’d be invited to it.

  But, if so, why? I could be counted on to write snide and mocking things about anyone who had a measure of power in the media business. Of the nearly fifty people here in this momentous room, I’d written unkindly about half of them.

  Indeed, Barry Diller, with drinks in both hands, came gliding by not a foot in front of me. “Michael,” he said, in courtly fashion, “I’d shake your hand but fortunately I’m holding two drinks.”

  Perhaps the people here were less wounded by what I had written about them than they were amused by what I had written about their colleagues and competitors. This was the zero-sum view: Everybody was there to see everyone else fail. I was part of the failure function. I was an angel of media business death. I articulated the nuances, even the poetics, of failure. Still, you would not necessarily think that that talent would earn you fancy invitations.

  I huddled in the room with the least famous and powerful: Gary Ginsberg, who was here because he had facilitated Murdoch, and Michael Elliott, an Englishman and editor at Time, and moderator of the closing panel on the news business, who was here for no reason that he could quite put his finger on.

  Steve Case, who for many years now I had written about as a great pretender, greeted me without awkwardness.

  I could only figure that to be here, to be in—to have made it over the social and career hurdles, to have gotten through the hierarchical gauntlet—meant you should be here. Of course, this was not so much a precise meritocratic point as a mirror trick—we accept you because you’re accepted. I was one with Steve Case. I found this unnerving.

  There was the further point that I was not just writing about the people here in withering fashion, but that I was regularly writing about the thing that they were most interested in. Not just the failure of their colleagues and competitors, but the comedy of it. I was, in my fashion, a light society writer. An up-to-date Cleveland Amory, the old patron of society and animal shelters. Or a British-style gossip or diarist. Auberon Waugh (with whom Tina Brown had had a youthful affair).

  Likely, nothing so interested everyone here as our thing—la cosa nostra—itself. And if you were devoting as much time as I was devoting to appreciating this thing, to valuing it and therefore celebrating it, at the same time you were dissecting or deconstructing it, well of course you’d get an invitation. I was Mario Puzo.

  And then you could go back to the political thing, the Walter Lippmann possibility. A column, by its constancy and ubiquity, is a weird and powerful instrument. Just by the fact that it is always there, every week, carping, hazing, reminding, grinding its axe, it becomes a piece of reality, a creator of reality. And, on that basis, everybody submits to it. And gets used to it.

  Of course, the other reason I might be here would have nothing to do with having been invited, o
r being wanted or accepted, but with having inserted and insinuated myself.

  This would, to some degree, be a reporter’s accomplishment—I’d gotten up close to the most powerful people of the age. I was a successful hack: I’d wheedled an invitation to the weekend at the country house. I was that reporter.

  The one with his face—his smarmy face—pressed to the glass.

  And myriad resentments bubbling up.

  In other words, I could not be sure my version of scathing criticism was not precisely tailored to be the scathing criticism that would be most appealing to the people here. I was an enabler not just of the grudges and cutthroat competition that pervaded the media business, but of the solipsistic notion that we were all inside this perfect bubble. Indeed, I helped define the parameters of the bubble, as certain Washington reporters helped define what lay within the Beltway. This was the meta thing. Meta gave both irony and gravitas to what we did. The delicious incongruity between our superficiality and our importance. The joie de vivre of self-referentialism. The stupendous, intoxicating power of being able to create the world we lived in—of this being the thing that executives could never discuss on pain of overweeningness and arrogance and self-parody, but which I could discuss for them.

  And then there were my personal aspirations. My Zeligness.

  It was a critical-mass function: If you knew enough people, were known to enough people, then you were part of the whole. Part of the network. If you’re on the minds of a majority of the planners of the guest list, then, with some predictability and inevitability, you become a guest. And if you are a guest at this event, then likely you become a guest at the next event—that you become part of the idea of any event.

  That was the deal.

  Not ten minutes after the cocktail party began, the mayor was suddenly directly and unavoidably in front of me, short, jowly, but counterintuitively appealing. Helplessly, I began to apologize. I couldn’t stop. Everything I had written about him, I dismissed, cringed about, set fire to. I went well past the point of simple social niceties.

  The more the mayor beamed—even blushed a bit—the more I grandly apologized. Why not?

  21

  PINCH

  The dinner was hosted by the two friends, Steve Rattner and Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

  It was unusual to see the Times chairman and publisher in such a full-blown, media-honcho setting. The Times, for so long, had held itself out from not just bare-knuckle media games, but from the philosophical notion of media itself.

  The Times was the Times. Period.

  Its counterpoint was Time magazine. A generation ago, the New-York Times Company and Time Inc. were close in size, businesswise, and in stature, culturally (although Time, historically, was more Waspy Republican, to the Times’ more Jewish Democrat leanings). But Time Inc.’s merger with Warner Communications turned it into something as far from the New York Times as a media company could possibly be (while at the same time, interestingly, changing the company from WASP Republican to Jewish Democrat).

  The Times maintained an almost stoic distance from the consolidation of the media world.

  Arthur, though, you could begin to infer—not least of all because of his long friendship with Rattner—was more and more impatient with this stoicism. Indeed, Arthur has the thing the Sulzberger family has traditionally and conspicuously not had: executive-itis. He likes to run things. He likes to put his mark on things. He is not transparent. He does not have, nor does he have much use for, a light touch.

  Change is his mantra.

  Like many other CEOs, he sees the organization as an extension of his views and sensibilities and ambitions. He’s a would-be Jack Welch.

  Almost every story that people tell about conversations with the Times publisher is somehow about his bluntness or flippancy—his tone issues. About him saying this or that person is an asshole, or about how something is all fucked up, or about some other swift, colloquial, often disparaging, unmediated remark he has made.

  Some time ago, when I called Arthur about doing a formal sit-down interview, he said he would think about it. When we spoke a few days later, he said, “I’ve really thought about it, and you know why I don’t want to do it? Because I hate New York magazine.”

  Many people have conflicted responses to his brusqueness or unceremoniousness—or superciliousness.

  First, it’s a little scary. You have a person with such great, even august, power, apparently not at all mindful of what he says. You’re afraid for him—that he might lack a certain order of self-control. Candor becomes aggression.

  And then you’re afraid for yourself.

  What does it mean when the chairman and publisher of the New York Times thinks someone is an asshole? What does it mean when the chairman and publisher of the Times says he hates my magazine?

  But then you find yourself wondering if it isn’t refreshing. The point is not that he talks differently from anyone else but that he talks just like anyone else. You could be friends. Why not? He’s quick and funny. He’s got an open smile. Bright eyes. Great hair. Let’s go have a drink.

  Then it gets confusing. Because you’ve separated him in your mind from the Times—in a way that you would never have separated his circumspect and courtly father. It’s not just that you’ve differentiated Arthur Jr. from the Times but that you have great trouble reconciling the two. Arthur in bearing and tone doesn’t seem Timesian at all. He isn’t earnest. He may be smart, but he isn’t thoughtful. He isn’t highbrow, or obviously culturally minded, or even recognizably a Jewish liberal—indeed, he gets annoyed when people assume that just because he’s from one of the great New York Jewish families, he is Jewish (he was raised as an Episcopalian).

  He seems, in a sense, more cut out to be a tabloid editor. He could be one of Murdoch’s sons, or any ambitious upstart in the media business.

  What he does not seem to be is the self-effacing steward, in a long line of self-effacing stewards, of the world’s greatest newspaper.

  The relationship of the Times, or more precisely the Times newsroom, to the Sulzberger family is an intricate, complex, and—despite the various books devoted to the subject—mysterious one. It is, arguably, the most successful relationship between staff and proprietor in journalism history. It’s not just the relative noninterference of the family in newsroom matters, or the remoteness factor—the Times editor functions more or less as prime minister, and the Sulzberger family, the Times’ controlling shareholders, as constitutional monarchs—but also the historical willingness of the controlling shareholders to see themselves as subordinated to the larger idea of the Times.

  Nobody seems to have assumed—as you might with any corporation that gets a new top executive—that as part of Arthur’s taking control, the company, and hence the paper, would naturally go in a dramatic, unsettling new direction.

  The elevation of Arthur to controlling executive has been, in fact, a glacial process. As recently as three years ago, when I asked Joe Lelyveld, then the executive editor of the paper, to speak on a conference panel, he could say that seeing as how he really didn’t have time for conferences, why didn’t I ask Arthur? (While this was probably as dismissive as it seemed, it was, I think, an acknowledgment that Arthur likes to speak to groups, that he is outward-looking in a way that the Times has not traditionally been outward-looking.)

  And yet it has happened. Young Arthur, as he is still persistently called (along with the belittling “Pinch”), has certainly taken charge. He has won various executive-suite battles with his father’s retainers. He has won various family turf feuds with ambitious cousins. And, in the figure of Howell Raines, he installed a guy as executive editor of the paper who spoke with his kind of I-don’t-care-ness in the newsroom. Indeed, Arthur may be the first member of his family to actually exert day-to-day management over the newsroom, trying to move it from its cautious, culturally insular, frequently obsessive-compulsive identity as World’s Greatest Newspaper into a more freewheeling, glamorous, un-
Timesian World’s Greatest Information Brand.

  As it happens, by most modern executive standards of deal-making and decisiveness and quarterly results, the motorcycle-driving publisher is good at his job. He may well be quite a talented modern media executive.

  In the media world, the business side of the Times has, for a generation at least, been something of a joke. Indeed, if you were in the media business and ended up at the New York Times, you were a joke. Even within the Times itself, you were a second-class citizen. The increasing stature and importance accorded to the business side at, for instance, Time Inc. and then at Time Warner did not reach the Times business side. After all, businesspeople at the Times just had to do what had been done for a hundred years—keep the paper going reasonably well. And do no harm.

  But under Arthur, the business operation at the paper has steadily—and stealthily—awakened.

  Four daily sections have grown to as many as eight (much more for advertising purposes than news concerns), big investment has been made in new production facilities, and a largely local audience has been transformed into a growing “national footprint.” An urban paper has gone suburban.

  At the conference that Joe Lelyveld had handed off to Arthur (this was in the spring of 2000), I asked Arthur about his then-rapt interest in the Internet. My question was about why the Times was now getting swept up in this faddishness when it had so successfully—or diffidently—resisted other media enthusiasms. “If you could rewrite your family’s history,” I asked, “would you have wanted the Sulzbergers in, say, 1953 to have made a big play for television?”

  “You bet I would!” he nearly yelped.

  Indeed, under Arthur, the Times has acquired, in addition to the eight network affiliates it already owns, a half-interest in one of the cable channels owned by the Discovery network.