All Rupe's Children: Meet the Murdochs

In December's Vanity Fair, Michael Wolff offers an intimate look at the Murdochs -- "one of the last functioning, even highly capable dynasties in the Western world."

The article is an excerpt from The Man Who Owns the News -- a book which, although fully authorized, has already prompted somesqueals of protest from its subject.

Here's a sampling of what Wolff has to say about:

Rupert as father figure:

[T]here are seldom days he doesn't speak to each of his children.... He's not just the patriarch but the mentor and strategist. And if he's often been the remote father--full of murmured regrets -- he is also the long-suffering one, stoically standing by as his children fail to heed him.

Murdoch's projection about his children manages to be both compellingly normal and obviously creepy at the same time.

Wendi Murdoch, née Deng, Rupert's third wife

[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. It is not craftiness and duplicity and avarice that are her character weaknesses but, after she cycles through a few adventures, her constant need for excitement, for drama, for change, for the new.
For further opportunity.

She has an interest in power, in who's who in the room.... On the one hand, this is avariciousness; on the other, astuteness. Vulgarity or discrimination.

Prudence, Rupert's eldest daughter:

[T]he official Murdoch-family wing nut. She gets away with saying what the others won't, even things that the others won't think, and she takes the various family members much less seriously than they do themselves.

And yet she is in some ways the child Murdoch is most comfortable with -- or at least the child who is least afraid of him....For her part, she finds it just slightly unsettling that he regularly mistakes her for one of his sisters.

Elisabeth, Rupert's first daughter by his second wife, Anna Torv:

[A] harridan of a manager.... A high-profile figure in the London-media social scene.

Lachlan, Rupert's eldest son:

[F]rictionless, affable, constant Lachlan is easy to get along with.
Uncomplicated. This is what makes him, in the eyes of the many
Murdoch-philes, not Murdoch enough.... He's as famous in Australia as
Prince William in England.

James, Lachlan's younger brother and current heir apparent to News Corp.:

Unlike Lachlan, James is like his father, News Corp. people believe. Or at least he tries to be. But it may not be so much his father that he's emulating as some generic idea of the advanced business figure.

In open-necked white dress shirt and steel-rimmed glasses, he's aggressive, implacable, focused, remote, fit, precise. His father is obviously proud, even perhaps slightly afraid of him, but, one might suspect, a little confused by him, too.

[E]ffortlessly programmatic, reductive, and process-oriented. And he's a marketer -- the one thing his father has never been.

The Murdoch clan:

They're certainly like the Bushes in their level of advantage, connections, resources, and focus on family entitlement. But they may be more Kennedy-like. The insularity is powerful; there is a sense, especially among Anna's children--Elisabeth, Lachlan, and
James--of being part of a rarefied order, of being judged against it, of there being no escape from it. They are trapped in the Murdoch bubble, in its exceptionalness.

The insularity can seem to take the form of an almost puppy-love closeness. It's one of Wendi's first impressions of the family, that they're always kissing each other and saying, "I love you." They can't have a telephone conversation--and they're always on the phone with each other--without many protestations of love.

By Jeff Bercovici, for portfolio.com

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