And, in a mogul-worthy bit of business cruelty, Arthur pulled a fast one on the Times’ longtime partner in the International Herald Tribune, the Washington Post Co., and gained full control over the (long-ailing) IHT.(This was “exactly what Ben Bradlee would have done,” said Arthur, grabbing at the mantle of the Post’s fabled and aggressive editor. Bradlee promptly responded by saying Young Arthur had “hijacked” the IHT, which would never have happened “if Arthur Sulzberger Sr. were still in charge or if Katharine Graham were alive.”)
This new business audacity is informed by a new business language. Sulzberger is, he recently told an interviewer, “agnostic about the method of distribution”—which is to say he has no overriding commitment to a newspaper as the medium. “It’s about cross-selling,” he has said, embracing the synergistic vision of other media conglomerates. It’s clearly the strategic view—market share, competitive positioning, franchise extension, category dominance—rather than the newsroom view, that more and more informs the direction of this international information franchise.
The Times, notably, is part of the consortium of media companies—which, as notably, did not include the Washington Post—that, during the autumn of 2002, was petitioning the FCC for regulatory changes that would allow them to own newspapers and television stations in the same market.
There is, I think, a denial mechanism among people in the Times newsroom that allows them to believe that while Arthur may be out to change the direction of the Times Company, that entity is somehow different and remote from the paper itself.
Indeed, the Times Company has always been involved in disparate, marginal ventures almost entirely irrelevant to the business of the newspaper.
And Arthur, no doubt, would be among the first to deny that corporate concerns would in any way redirect the mission of the newsroom.
And yet, everywhere you read the tea leaves at the Times, there was the story of the diminishing returns of a regional newspaper company versus the much greater potential of an ever-expanding information brand.
Nor did it seem like happenstance or mere hospitality that Arthur, with his banker friend, Steve Rattner, was hosting this conclave of moguls.
Not long ago, a former Times man I know had occasion to talk with Arthur Sulzberger Sr. and to ask conversationally what he thought of his son’s paper. The senior Sulzberger replied, without directly answering the question, that the heyday of the Times was in the seventies.
This may not have been as much a reflection on his son’s stewardship, or on the quality of the paper itself, as just an acknowledgment of a world where flagship-driven, proprietor-run media companies once happily thrived. The seventies, after all, were the heyday for Time Inc. and the three networks and the Washington Post too.
Arthur Jr. is in a different world—which he may or may not successfully navigate. But it’s his ship.
It’s his company. He’s the mogul.
The strategic question that the profane, smart-alecky, impatient publisher always seems to be asking at his favored form of discourse, the corporate retreat, is, How profoundly does the Times change? The tactical question is how to keep the extent of the metamorphosis from people in the newsroom. Or, more complicated: how to get the people in the newsroom to facilitate the change without their being aware that that is what they’re doing.
You wouldn’t want to appear in the third-floor newsroom and try to explain that the Times has many good qualities that are worth preserving, but the paper and its publisher also have ambitions in a larger, polymorphous media world. Where the audience is different. Where the values may be different. Where the priorities are different. Where being the newspaper of record is an equivocal value proposition. Where cross-platforms demand a certain … plasticity.
Even Arthur wouldn’t want to just blurt this out. This requires some finesse.
Anyway, Arthur was making more or less charming remarks at the dinner, including, in a Dean Martin sort of way, going on about the virtues of many martinis.
22
THE FINAL
DINNER
I was Seated next to John Sykes, who ran Infinity Communications, the second biggest radio network in the country (after Clear Channel) owned by Viacom.
There were seven or eight tables, each with six men and one woman, with everyone served a very big piece of meat, without vegetarian option.
The deal was that at each table, we were supposed to discuss the future of the business (topics provided) and, once again, try to answer that hoary question: What’s the next big thing? Then, over dessert, Charlie Rose would lead us in a Socratic inquiry. (I’m not kidding.)
Now, it is hard to imagine that most people here did not find this a little childish, or bush league. On the other hand, because this was the media business, the mass media, there is always an effort to re-create or imitate the bush league and the childlike—to be like ordinary folk. Also, I think, famous people like to see other famous people subjected to a measure of control and discipline—just a whiff of humiliation. This was, of course, a room of sadists.
Then, too, everybody here is a performer of some order—and wants to go to the head of the class.
And then there was the Sulzberger New York Times thing—we should be serious.
Still, I think everybody found the topic to be somewhat embarrassing. First, because it was old-hat. At the very least, two years out-of-date. What’s more, there was the pervasive sense that there was no next big thing. Or certainly no big thing in the way the question was meant, no coming wave of enthusiasm, no profound and transforming fork in the road, no voilà!
It was not really a question worthy of this kind of firepower.
But a parlor game was a parlor game.
There was a brief exegesis on the room we were sitting in by one of the officials of the National Museum of the American Indian. She hurried through the presentation.
Then Steve Rattner gave a short after-dinner welcome and turned the floor over to Charlie Rose.
I wondered if Charlie was at all put out about having to perform for his supper like this.
But there was something reassuringly itinerant about Charlie. He was willing to ply his trade.
The discussion got off to a lackluster start with Zoe Baird talking at some meandering length. Zoe Baird is most noteworthy for having been the first Clinton nominee for attorney general and then having been dinged from the job and semidisgraced because of having failed to pay taxes for her nanny. But she had risen after that and taken over the Markle Foundation—a sponsor of the conference—which had, in the go-go years, opportunistically rededicated its mission to the Internet, a subject that Baird, like so many other people who got onto this particular bandwagon, knew next to nothing about. What’s more, the foundation had been recently excoriated in a long article in the Times for wild overspending and expense account abuses and failing to accomplish most of what it said it would accomplish. Baird spoke blandly and earnestly.
Walter Isaacson also spoke blandly and earnestly, but it was his particular ability to make the bland and earnest somehow of moment. He lent it intensity. He lent it at least the expectation of intelligence. When Zoe Baird spoke nobody listened; when Walter spoke everybody listened.
Everybody was very earnest. It was like a book club meeting or a really painful wedding.
Nobody had anything above the level of uninteresting to say.
But the real point was that nobody knew the answer to the question.
And this was not an insignificant point.
Everybody here, in greater and lesser ways, was seriously fucked. And while nobody was going to come out and say that, nobody was going to give a good-times-are-just-around-the-corner speech either. It was, finally, a very awkward choice of topics.
Barry Diller, when Charlie called upon him (Charlie knew that everybody always wanted to hear Barry speak) was the only respondent to move off the bland and earnest. He expressed with equal parts wit, condescension, befuddlement, and even a
certain sort of humility that he did not remotely have an answer here to what was the next big thing. (And, in fact, he may have known.)
Mostly I was waiting for this to be over. I found it all awkward and embarrassing. You wanted it to pass. You didn’t want to participate. You didn’t want to be that sort of hotdog. To participate was just to call for attention—which prolonged everyone else’s agony. And yet, a few times my eyes brushed past Charlie’s. I wasn’t entirely listening here, and every time I did listen I got more annoyed because nothing was being said—and even more annoyed because people were going through the motions of saying it—and, so, expressing my impatience, as well as my deep need to go to the head of the class, I caught and, for a just a second, held Charlie’s eye.
He called on me.
I wasn’t any less self-serious than anybody else.
But I thought, why not? What was there to lose? And might not there be something to gain?
Nail the thesis to the door.
The next big thing, I said (and took a breath), was that we were going to find out how unhappy everybody is in the media business.
I said I knew this because “the people who work for you” call me up constantly to complain. Even some of the people in this room have called me up to complain about how rotten and unsatisfying and dispiriting and ridiculous the business is.
Hello?
Nobody, I went on, can possibly enjoy or get satisfaction from working inside such colossuses. Everybody’s in their particular Soviet Union.
There is a dark and growing rage in the ranks. While we partied, the media business was rebelling from within. (Granted, there was not a lot of evidence of rebellion—still, there was certainly lots of passive aggression.) It would be pulled apart by a bigness-induced psychosis, as well as by the ever-growing pressure and sure futility of the search for the next big thing.
Charlie was looking at me with some concern.
And there was that pin-dropping silence feeling.
I had surely gone too far. I’d brought too much emotion here.
What could anyone say? Yes, we’ve mismanaged everything. We’ve screwed it all up. Sucked the big one.
But I was right. And, if the people here didn’t think it was true about their own companies, they certainly thought it was true about other people’s companies.
I thought I should just charge on. I should force this point. I had the floor. I should hold it. Fifty of the most important people in the media business gathered together—a veritable Mafia retreat—I should make them listen.
Instead, I sat down. Sank. Was ashamed of myself for trying to say this, was ashamed of myself for not insisting further.
Charlie called on Ken Auletta. I interpreted this as a further slap. It was sort of, Let’s hear from an adult journalist. A real inside journalist. A voice of experience. I had a sudden, overwhelming, blind hatred for Auletta. For his prissiness and sanctimony and his willingness to stroke these guys and his interest in being on their side.
He said, rising, “I think Michael is right.”
And, as though there were a sudden rising background musical score, the entire tone of the room changed.
This was partly, on Ken’s part, just kindness and generosity—the same kindness and generosity which made everyone like Ken, and, which, on Ken’s say-so, now made them think better of me.
And yet, if Ken was saying this too, or accepting it, what everyone realized, and what I understood too, is that the conventional wisdom was in fact heading in the direction of what I was saying.
And indeed, the question of the next big thing was, in so many words, just another way of locating the conventional wisdom.
There was a gravitational pull here; the forces of negativity were out there and getting stronger every day. Various people in this room were going to have to pay for other people’s dissatisfaction and unhappiness.
Ha!
23
BARRY
TRIUMPHANT–
SORT OF
In the morning, Charlie and Barry took to the stage.
This was very exciting. Barry is imbued with all kinds of currents. Violence and humor and playfulness and toughness and sensuality and hard-nosed financial acumen.
You want to get close to hear what the legend has to say, not least of all because you don’t know which legend will be talking: the charming or the surly.
It’s quite unfiltered too. Reflexive. Depending on his mood. What he had for dinner last night. Who he had for dinner last night.
Here’s my precious Barry Diller story: On a Saturday morning a long, long time ago, the New York Times Magazine sent me to interview Diller, then the chairman of Paramount Pictures. (“He’s the new 400-pound Hollywood gorilla,” said Times Magazine editor and future movie producer Lynda Obst.) I met him at the home of his then-consort, now wife, Diane von Furstenberg—a flocked-wallpaper apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking the Central Park reservoir. In an open-neck shirt—as bald at 39 as he is now, a sort of cross between Mussolini and Picasso—and no socks, holding a large glass of juice and sitting in a massive upholstered chair, Diller said to me, shortly into our conversation: “You know, you can’t say anything about my personal life.” Most shocking was that the 400-pound gorilla had a kind of whiny voice.
“Of course,” I said, fumbling, “only to the extent that your personal life is relevant to the story.” He was not only a megagorilla but, every whisper agreed, a gay one in what was still, in the late seventies, a highly homophobic business.
“No. I don’t think you understand,” he said in his discordant whine. “I would kill you.”
(Note to libel lawyers: While I did not actually believe that he would kill me, I do not think anyone had or has ever spoken to me in exactly the same way before or since.)
After a horrifyingly long pause, he said, suddenly brightening: “Well, I understand Simon & Schuster“—a Gulf+Western—owned company, as was Paramount—“is going to be publishing a book of yours soon. I hear great things about it. We’d like to take a look at it at Paramount.”
Imagining my film career, I called the Times Magazine that Monday morning and resigned the piece. In due course I found myself on a conference call with Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg—then Diller’s lieutenants at Paramount—asking me to explain to them what I had told Barry to get him so interested in my book and offering me a first-class ticket out to the Coast. In short order, I was sitting out by Barry’s pool in Coldwater Canyon—just Barry and me and houseman—as he talked in the most contemptuous language I had ever heard about the power elite of the movie business. This was dissing of an extraordinary order.
Oh, yes, he never did buy my book.
Still, for years afterward, I could do a parlor trick. I could dial Barry Diller’s office number and he would immediately come to the phone.
Nearly twenty-five years later, when he was told that this was a story I circulate about him, he responded, winningly, with the epigraph for this book: “I should have killed him when I had the chance.”
The threat, the charm, the joke.
He was Sinatra—as perfectly and as classically and as elegantly and as frighteningly Hollywood as you could ever be. Even Barry’s suits equal the perfection of Sinatra’s during the Capitol years.
And he was as successful as Sinatra and in similar ways. People were afraid of him. The fear thing was huge. A vast business advantage. People gave you what you wanted; they didn’t risk offending you with negotiations; they didn’t cheat you at the edges. They gave you wide berth; they gave you more rather than less; they tried to curry favor.
Fear is a great business tool.
Everybody in this audience was looking at Barry and was a little afraid of him. You could feel the way people were on the edge of their seats. If Barry had turned to this audience and smiled and then said “Boo!” everybody would have jumped an inch.
Barry’s Story was surely the story of the moment and there was the sense that it would all,
very shortly, come to its dénouement.
What would he do with Universal?
He was toying with this company. He was the big cat and the company was the little mouse.
You sensed his tactile pleasure—he held the company, torturing it.
They hated him at Universal. No, “hated” is not strong enough.
By all accounts, Ron Meyer, who had been running Universal for the past several years, who had withstood Bronfman and Messier and ill fortune of so many kinds, and Doug Morris, at Universal Music, who was pretty much the only guy in the music business to still be running a viable enterprise, weren’t just at odds with Diller, the part-time chairman, but were made physically ill by him.
There was sadism here.
And yet Barry was doing his job. His job was not to protect Universal—not yet, at least—but to protect his odd interest in the company, the money, the various billions due him, and to preserve his options. To buy the company for the lowest possible price, even to lower the value of the company, certainly to probe all of its weaknesses, so that he would know what he was buying, and know more than the people who were selling it to him.
Here’s another point: Barry had become unhitched from the corporation, from even the idea of the corporation.
The corporation—that is, these big, dumb, blundering, blind collections of almost invariably badly run and underperforming assets—was there for him to abuse.
There are guys who grow up in the corporation and then, because of ill winds, get set adrift and they never quite get anchored again. But then there are guys, like Barry, cut off from the mother ship who realize that they hold all the secrets, they have seen the blueprints, know the playbooks, possess the exact same DNA. Hence, they can become a kind of evil twin.
Having been inside, and now outside, you know every deal, and you know every deal-maker, and you know where all the money is, and you know too much for people not to want to make a deal with you, which, because you know what you know is going to be a good deal—you’re always buying low and selling high—so more and more people want to do deals with you, want to be on your side (although, of course, they never really are on your side), which means you are the man.
Autumn of the Moguls Page 28
