Autumn of the Moguls

by Michael Wolff

  I come from an era when journalism was in its finest flowering, an era that a colleague of mine likes to call the late renaissance of the magazine business, which would have been the 1970s. That was a moment in time when you had some of the best practitioners of long-form magazine nonfiction writing working and that would have included everyone from Norman Mailer to Joan Didion to Michael Herr to Tom Wolfe to Gloria Emerson.

  Are there any of your contemporaries that you look up to?

  Most of my friends are journalists and I love them dearly but as for anybody doing really distinguished work, I mean, I have to beg off on that. We have arrived at a point in the journalism business that is very, very discouraging.

  Why?

  Because very few people are doing interesting work or original work, attention-getting work. If I had to characterize it, most of the work is of the most conservative kind. It’s risk-free writing. It’s follow-the-rules writing. It’s top-down writing. It is largely written by people who are – quite frankly- not writers.

  And that’s the result of media consolidation?

  I think it’s one of the results. Definitely. Why-would anyone be in this business now? You’re only in this business if you’re a mediocrity or if you’re old like me. Somehow I got caught in it. Too late to get out.

  LIFE AT A GLANCE

  BORN

  27 August 1953

  EDUCATED

  Columbia University (history degree). Graduated 1975

  CAREER

  1973-4 Journalist at the New York Times 1974-85 Freelance writer 1976-2003 Journalist at the New York magazine 1985-90 Media consultant and entrepreneur 1990-94 CEO Michael Wolff & Company (book publisher) 1994-97 CEO Wolff New Media (internet start-up), 1998 Columnist for Industry Standard magazine 2004- Columnist for Vanity Fair Frequent contributor to the Guardian newspaper (UK); numerous appearances as television commentator. Author of Burn Rate(1998); White Kids(1979); Where We Stand (1992), with Peter Rutten and Chip Beyers

  AWARDS

  Two-time winner of the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary. Nominee for National Magazine Award 2003 and 2004

  PERSONAL

  Michael Wolff is married with three children

  But you did run an internet company in the 1990s, didn’t you?

  I did. I have tried my damnedest.

  What did it do?

  I have no idea what it did. It certainly spent a lot of money doing whatever it did and it was certainly paying a lot of people a lot of money doing whatever they did.

  Does it still exist?

  No. Which companies do from that period of time?

  Would you ever get back into business again?

  Every time the urge comes over me I try to lie down. The truth is I just tried to buy the magazine I was working for – New York magazine. Its owner put it up for sale and I tried to put together a group of people to buy it. And in that, as in so many business endeavours, I did not succeed. But I could not help myself from plunging in and trying to do it.

  Could an American president take a network to task over coverage like the Kelly affair?

  That’s an interesting question. The difference is that somehow the entire institution of the BBC became anchored to this one broadcast.

  Instead of saying the Today programme screwed it up, it somehow became the BBC itself. I can’t quite see that happening here. But there have been instances where the administration and the media have directly locked horns. The best examples are Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. The question might be: why doesn’t that happen any more? And the answer is, among the other answers, that the media is owned by four or five corporations who have interests other than the news.

  Could a media mogul became the US president, or do you need to be in oil to achieve that?

  Yes. I think it’s possible that a media mogul could. Yes.

  Do you still go to Michael’s much?

  I was just there an hour ago.

  Christ.

  Christ is what I’d say.

  What’s good there?

  Nothing. The food is just terrible.

  What’s the service like?

  Service is good. Delightful. The food is terrible.

  Has Rupert [Murdoch] read the book yet?

  I understand that he has. People have reported to me the movement of the book on his desk.

  Has there been any comeback from people about what you’ve said?

  Obviously many people have stopped talking to me as usual, but then there are other people who take a weird – perhaps slightly masochistic – fascination in what I say about them. The other day I was with someone I’d written about, and he described the experience as being both nauseating and exhilarating.

  Toby Young said your book had been heavily censored in the UK. Is this right?

  I found the UK libel reading absurd. In truth, it was not heavily censored, merely because I dug in my heels and caused a relative commotion. But if the lawyers had had their way then, yes, it would have been stripped. I said to the lawyers, ‘Hello?’ – one of the things about running a major media company (and the people I write about run major m/edia companies) is that you defend against libel suits, you don’t initiate them. You live in a fucked-up country where that happens. None of that happens here.

  Top Ten Favourite Books

  Huckleberry Finn

  Mark Twain

  Advertisements for Myself

  Norman Mailer

  Humboldt’s Gift

  Saul Bellow

  Homage to Catalonia

  George Orwell

  Portnoy’s Complaint

  Philip Roth

  Tristram Shandy

  Laurence Sterne

  Dispatches

  Michael Herr

  The Best and the Brightest

  David Halberstam

  The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power

  Robert A. Caro

  The Great Gatsby

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  About the Book

  Critical Eye

  DOES IT COMEAS any surprise that some journalists have felt distinctly uncomfortable around Michael Wolff’s merciless style? The New Statesman shuffles nervously, describing his character assassination of Tina Brown as, ‘a bit unkind’. The Guardian admits Wolff’s book is ‘hugely entertaining’, but laments that ‘there are moments when you want him to find a kind word for someone’.

  But the Spectator’s Toby Young, perhaps speaking from some experience, reckons that Wolff’s constant flirtation with career suicide stems from a quite genuine helplessness. ‘Wolff’s pen seems to have a mind of its own, frequently writing things that are completely at odds with his own self-interest.’ Young calls Wolff ‘The Alexander Pope of the mogul set’, and quotes the author who recently said of himself, ‘I sometimes think there is some odd piece of social DNA that I am missing here’.

  Indeed, Wolff’s style appears to be infectious. The Daily Telegraph was very taken with his model of the modern business community (‘… egomaniacs who are anxious to cut deals on the front pages rather than the back’) but then really got its claws out, pointing out the similarities with Gordon Brown: ‘His message is that business is power, and power is business. The rest is chaff’.

  Of the writing itself, the Sunday Telegraph compares Michael Wolff to another Manhattanite: ‘He can compress complex thoughts into slick sentences which read well if you say them aloud in a Woody Allen accent.’ The Daily Telegraph calls it ‘hyperbolic and brilliantly truthful’, adding that ‘some of Wolff’s greatest comic passages have a strain of melancholy’.

  Perhaps predictably, the Financial Times was all too familiar with some of Wolff’s haunts. ‘Wolff is undeniably good at personal description. Having met some of his subjects, and even lunched at Michael’s (this is catching), I can testify to this.’ The FT also captures the importance of Wolff’s crucially self-effacing style: ‘His frailties fit him well to chronicle the media age’. The Guardian a
grees, saying that the author’s ‘willingness to put himself in the stocks’ offsets the onslaughts he unleashes on his mogul quarry.

  The New Statesman observes that, even though Wolff’s corporate battlefield is the US, his message is strangely comforting for readers across the pond: ‘For most of us in Britain who feel guilty that we know so little about the mighty moguls who created and ran these great corporations, this book is reassuring. It tells us not to worry. Despite their past deification in magazines like Vanity Fair, they are, for the most part, ghastly, boring, untrustworthy people. Not only that: they are passé, finished, through’.

  But what of Vanity Fair? Will it continue to fawn over these moguls? Well, early in 2004, Michael Wolff joined the editorial team. There’s your answer.

  Play Up to the Stereotype

  by Rufus Jones

  A NO-NONSENSE Australian walks into his executive box at the Superbowl, where he finds an obese father of three helping himself to the finger buffet. ‘I’m Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire tyrant,’ the Australian shouts. Homer Simpson, father of three, asks him to prove it. Murdoch makes the football players spell out ‘Hi, Rupert!’ down on the field. He then conjures up three security guards in a puff of smoke. Homer flees.

  History has shown that media moguls find it nigh On impossible to resist the limelight of the glitzy content they control. But if you’re going to step out of the boardroom and onto the boards, you’d better pray it comes off well. Murdoch’s brief appearance in the tenth season of The Simpsons – a show seen by many as the jewel in Fox’s crown – was a masterclass in how to pull it off. Play up to the stereotype. Make people laugh. Get off quick.

  It wasn’t without risk, either. The Simpsons’ deceptively acidic brand of satire didn’t shy away from a few sly digs at Fox, its own station, and the relationship between Murdoch and Simpsons creator Matt Groening has had its fraught moments (Read ‘My Dinner With Rupert’, Chapter Three in Book Two). This is, of course, exactly the way it should be. What sort of show would The Simpsons be if it didn’t ruffle the feathers of its own mother hen? Late in 2003, Groening claimed Fox News was considering suing the show for parodying its rolling news ticker (‘Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple…’ ran one of Springfield’s spoof headlines), though he added that it was unlikely that Murdoch would allow Fox to effectively sue itself. Groening was right. Besides, a Fox spokesman denied the litigation claims, saying the channel had found the episode hysterical.

  Michael Wolff says that the new generation of media suits ‘[aren’t] the talent, but they can’t stand to be so far from the talent that there is no chance for the spotlight to ever hit them.’ Think of the hyper-visible Miramax supremo Harvey Weinstein, rarely seen at a premier without an Affleck on one arm, a Paltrow on the other. But that’s not to say that your old-school moguls looked on talent with the sangfroid of a bored accountant at the opera.

  ‘Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst loved to surround himself with the talent. In fact, he loved the talent full stop.’

  Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst loved to surround himself with the talent. In fact, he loved the talent full stop. He courted silent star Marion Davies and held parties for his movie idols at his Californian San Simenon chateau. One of those San Simenon guests was Herman Mankiewicz, who went away and wrote a screenplay about his host – Citizen Kane. Many paper columnists, notably those working for Hearst, spotted the biographical similarities between Orson Welles’s Charles Foster Kane and their proprietor. Kane was a thinly veiled portrait of Hearst, and none too flattering.

  So Hearst fought back. His papers ran damaging stories about Welles’s personal life. Hollywood executives who had enjoyed the hospitality of San Simenon attempted to buy and burn the Kane negative, and theatres were dissuaded from showing the film. Welles was booed at the 1942 Academy Awards, and the film – arguably the greatest ever to come out of Hollywood – won just a single Oscar. The film gathered dust until its greatness began to be uncovered a decade later.

  ‘News is something somebody doesn’t want printed,’ Hearst once said. He was right. As prints of Citizen Kane became more freely available, so stories of Hearst’s savage suppression of the film became big news. Disastrously for Hearst and his legacy, these stories have become almost as well known as the film itself. When The Simpsons came calling, Murdoch played the game, and laughed. When Orson Welles came calling, Hearst refused to see the joke. And he suffered for it.

  ‘One mogul who completely succeeded in developing and controlling his media image was Walt Disney.’

  One mogul who completely succeeded in developing and controlling his media image was Walt Disney. Disney himself projected a character that was almost as recognizable as his mouse. The avuncular smile. The pencil moustache. This was achieved through exploiting the booming medium of television – Walt Disney could be credited with creating the first multimedia company. Disney was frequently seen presenting his own show on TV, while making self-deprecating and surprisingly witty guest appearances on the Jack Benny and Ed Sullivan shows. As a result, Walt’s face became a feature in the living rooms of the American public, a picture of trustworthiness. And this image persists today, and helps – with some success – to defend the Disney heritage from some of the more unpalatable stories to emerge about its founder’s life. Did Disney really make his animators punch out every time they left their desks to go to the toilet? We know he was very patriotic – so patriotic that he happily cooperated with the House of Un-American Activities in 1947, and accused one of his former employees of being a Communist.

  ‘Did Disney really make his animators punch out every time they left their desks to go to the toilet?’

  The fact that moguls have politics won’t come as news to many. Nor the fact that they frequently exert their political opinions through their own media. But what happens when a newspaper mogul’s line runs contrary to the views expressed in his own organ? Well, if you’re Conrad Black, you write in to your own paper and complain. This happened in 2001, when Telegraph boss Black wrote a piece in the Spectator accusing his provocative columnist, Taki, of anti-semitism. Taki defended himself, while the Spectator’s letters page became a battlefield. Former Black employees wrote a joint letter saying that Black’s pro-Israel editorial could jeopardize balanced Middle East coverage within his group. Black parried, saying that he was merely expressing his opinion, like any other reader of the Spectator.

  Conrad Black’s behaviour seems to confirm Michael Wolff’s theory of the modern media executive, who has ‘The need not just for attention but for approval. The modern media executive sees himself as less a manipulator, or creator, or producer, than a performer.’ But despite the hegemony of the media brand, despite the ever-increasing consolidation within the industry, it is strangely comforting to know that a mogul’s appearance in the limelight remains a controversial venture.

  Read on

  Have You Read?

  Other titles by Michael Wolff

  Burn Rate (1998)

  In 1994 Michael Wolff plunged into the internet boom with his start-up, Wolff New Media. This typically savage and self-deprecating account of his foray into the dot.com arena captures the hysteria and idiocy of the time, a time when business acumen was ignored in favour of looking cool in a cool industry. Ludicrous venture capital, crazy deal-making, and ultimate hubris.

  ‘Wolff, a nimble writer with a knack for spotting colourful details, moves the story along at movie-of-the-week pace.’ New York Times Book Review

  ‘Burn Rate has a terrific feel for the crazy deals, the characters and the clashing bicoastal cultures of the internet.’ New York Times

  White Kids (1979)

  A revolution, a crime, a remarkable boy, a honeymoon, a war. Michael Wolff’s first book is the tender account of a generation living in the shadow of the sixties and through the end of the Vietnam War.

  Where We Stand (1992), with Peter Rutten and Chip Beyers

  Wolff’s provocative
end-of-the-millennium survey sizes up and compares twenty-seven nations. Which country has the longest working week? Which is the healthiest? Which is the safest? Packed with cartoons, tables and charts, Where We Stand became a PBS television series.

  If You Loved This, You’ll Like…

  Back Story: Inside the Business of News by Ken Auletta

  Auletta, media correspondent with the New Yorker, probes the pressure that business exerts on the editorial direction of modern US journalism. Michael Wolff says Auletta has ‘long since passed the point of mere journalism and become in status and in demeanour and influence a mogul associate’.

  The Powers That Be by David Halberstam Halberstam’s mighty 1979 dissection of the US media industry. A book Michael Wolff credits with inspiring the careers of many a journalist. That doesn’t mean he agrees with it, though.

  Burning Down My Masters’ House: My Life at the New York Times by Jayson Blair From the New York Times journalist who was caught plagiarizing and fabricating his stories, and who prompted a crisis of credibility in US journalism. An opportunistic rush-job, but a grim document of the age.

  Hollywood Animal by Joe Eszterhas From the screenwriter of Basic Instinct, a kamikaze exposure of that other region of the media – the movie business. Eszterhas was a former power-player, now Captain Kurtz of Hollywood. Operatically decadent.

  Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner by Alec Klein Washington Post reporter Klein’s account of the most notorious merger in history. Klein’s reporting is credited with prompting government investigations into the company.