Behind Wendi Deng’s billion-dollar spike
By Eric Ellis The opinions expressed are his own.
Tiger wife or Trophy wife? Slam-down Sister or caring partner doing a Tammy Wynette? New York socialite or about-to-be global media mogul?
When Wendi Deng soared on Tuesday, 42 and pretty-in-pink, left across our TV screens to clobber the idiot cream-pieing her struggling octogenarian billionaire husband, my first thought was of Messrs Wang Chongsheng and Xie Qidong, two hale and delightful old men retired in the central Chinese city of Xuzhou, where Wendi grew up as Deng Weng Ge, or “Cultural Revolution Deng” as was a parent’s political imperative of those dark Maoist days.
Mr Wang was Wendi’s volleyball coach at Xuzhou’s No 1 Middle School, and Mr Qie her academic supervisor. Wang taught her volleyball, and rather too well for the scholarly Qie’s taste. Both men can be seen in this slideshow.) “She lagged behind other students because of playing volleyball,” he complained when I met him in early 2007. Xie persuaded Wendi to give up volleyball and focus on university entry exams. “Because she had good health, she could stay very late at night to make up her study,” he says. “She has a struggling spirit and made big progress. I also would say she is smart.” Giving succour to those of us who wonder what use high school ever is for later life, it seems that Wendi at least retained Wang’s ability to execute an Olympic medal-winning spike over the net.
It may well be a spike worth billions. Wendi has never been the most favorite member of the Murdoch family among the clan itself since Rupert, double her age, took her as his third wife in 1999. Indeed, after getting over the shock that their Dad had left their sainted mother Anna after 32 years, Elisabeth, Lachlan and James Murdoch were relieved to read, shortly after he married Wendi, Murdoch’s remarks to an interviewer that Wendi’s job was “as a home decorator,” that she was not “some business genius about to take over News.”
“She’s intelligent,” he charitably observed, “but she’s not going to do that, I assure you.” (Wendi’s friends were incensed. “She didn’t marry him to sit at home and be a society wife,” said one.) And indeed, there was an unseemly family scrap over succession though 2006, ending in Rupert handing each of his new family a silencing $100 million in (now much-reduced) News Corp stock.
But after her star turn in London this week, Wendi suddenly looms much larger in a post-Rupert News Corp particularly if, as many predict, son James falls victim to the phone-hacking scandal. Not that a well-aimed volleyball spike does a media mogul make. But Wendi’s intervention distracted from a grilling that was not going well for the Murdochs. And she will be rewarded, her family stock higher than it’s ever been after her husband was sympathetically transformed from scheming evil genius to doddering old duffer. As the BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson revealed, one of the battery of their grim-faced lawyers ranged behind Rupert and James, supposedly mumbled that the pie attack aftermath was “very good” for the cause.
Murdoch vs. parliament: No curtain call yet
Near the end of his dramatic testimony, at the end of what he called his most humbling day, a prankster tried to tag Rupert Murdoch with a pie in the face. He missed.
It may be the defining moment in the whole sordid ordeal of the cell phone hacking scandal which has beset News Corp: try as many MPs might have, it would appear at first blush that Murdoch father and son delivered the finessed performance of contrition, cooperation and combativeness that could change the tempo of the outcry against the media empire, now under fire on two continents — and possibly a third.
Murdoch’s answers will be picked apart for days — why was this the most humbling day of his career, and not his life? — but for the sake of appearances, which matter most because they will frame the meme, Rupert and James Murdoch did themselves every possible favor in an arena that could have resulted in unmitigated disaster.
News Corp stock was up more than five percent after the hours of testimony, likely on the sense that Murdoch the elder won’t be forced to step aside — he said he had no intention to — and on fresh, real-time evidence that son James is confident and capable without being arrogant.
It was the absence of any sense of entitlement that will probably be what saves the Murdochs, if indeed the tide has turned on today’s globally-televised inquisition. One needn’t look any further than last summer’s testimony of former British Petroleum CEO Tony Hayward in an equivalent setting before the U.S. Senate to know that smart people who aren’t necessarily in the wrong, and whose company has ponied up at least $20 billion in damage payments, can be destroyed by merely appearing to not get it while on TV.
This was a TV event if there ever was one. Murdoch is a naturalized U.S. citizen but our fascination with the Australian-born mogul has less to do with our overdone parochialism than how he transformed the media landscape as much and as rapidly in the generation before the Internet as the Internet has done since.
From his transformation of the New York Post into the prototypical Fleet Street tabloid, to the re-invention of cable news & commentary with Fox, to the full-throated belief in a digital future represented by the purchase of MySpace and the creation of the iPad-only publication The Daily, to the quest for respectability that came with the acquisition of the august Wall Street Journal, Murdoch is news — and he is seldom subjected to questioning that might be deemed unfriendly.
Murdock controls the direction for the US, UK and AUS. On both sides of the Atlantic he decides who get into office and who stays out. Both the US and UK are acting like sheep when he calls.
How I Wolff’d down the Murdoch book
After nearly setting off my tilt mechanism at Thanksgiving dinner by eating twice my weight in food, I spent the earlier part of Friday gorging on as much of Michael Wolff’s new Rupert Murdoch biography as I could. I read just enough to think of some questions for Wolff that wouldn’t come off as sounding too stupid, and then we got on the phone.
First, a short reminder of why we care about Rupert Murdoch and want to read Wolff’s book, “The Man Who Owns the News,” which Broadway Books, an imprint of Random House’s Doubleday label, is releasing on Dec. 2 (after passing some copies around to people like me):
- Murdoch is the legendarily aggressive Australian businessman who built News Corp into an international media empire.
- He owns this crazy collection of stuff, from MySpace to the New York Post to Sky Italia to stakes in companies in countries you’ve never even heard of.
- He did it despite — and perhaps because of — his treatment by more well-heeled media contemporaries as a vulgar, Antipodean mutant form of themselves.
- He’s a big risk-taker, as evidenced by his $5.6 billion purchase of Dow Jones & Co and its crown jewel, The Wall Street Journal. That price was 65 percent more than the company was worth.
- His love life with the much younger Wendi Deng causes constant speculation about who will run his empire when he is gone.
- Some people think he uses his news outlets to advance his business interests, something that in utterly unremarkable in certain parts of the world.
Now for some Q&A with Michael Wolff. We moved one or two items out of chronological order to preserve a bit of continuity with the questions.
Q: Why did you write this book?
A: My primary aim was to get Rupert on paper, to get a real sense of who this guy is. I wasn’t really interested in whether he was a good guy or a bad guy or good for journalism or bad for journalism.
Q: He saw an early copy of the book, according to the blogs. Has he tried to contact you?
Any woman who is carrying a handbag will instinctively smack any man who comes close and tries to grab, rob or attack her handbag. If you want to see how it works, just go to a bus station or a subway station and try grabbing one of the women’s handbags, and see if she will instinctively smack you. And Murdoch is a walking diamond mine, this woman and her children future fortune is all on this old man. This is no different from a tiger guarding her prey that she caught. It’s all about money, money, and money, it’s billions dollars and a media empire at stake here. Anyone who thinks this is the instinct of true love is an idiot. There is love for sure, it’s call love for the billions.