With six children from three marriages, Rupert Murdoch’s family is a source of endless drama and speculation—its dynamics tightly bound to his News Corp. empire. VFArchive
As the oldest of Murdoch's children. Prue is the family maverick, unafraid to speak her mind to her father.James started Rawkus Records before joining News Corp. and is now seen as"the real thing" in the company.Murdoch’s ideas about girls seem to change substantially with Elisabeth, born 10 years after Prue. This is partly about the broad cultural change that’s happening as Elisabeth is growing up. But it’s also that Elisabeth is growing up in New York.
She is often uncontrollable—including a suspension from school for drinking. She fights more with her strict, formal mother than with him. Away so often, he’s the good guy.Petronella Wyatt, the daughter of his British friend Woodrow Wyatt, has Liz, in her memory of a teenage summer trip, climbing on the back of a Vespa and roaring off with an Italian man who chatted them up in a Roman bar.
She gets into Stanford Business School. “I called my dad and said, ‘I’ve gotten into Stanford and I’m going.’ But Murdoch, annoyed by Elisabeth’s failure to get along with Chisholm, her latest pregnancy, and the increasingly critical reports of her London life, doesn’t give her the top job. Elisabeth “has some things to work out,” he tells Mathew Horsman, a reporter from“She has to decide how many kids she is going to have, where she wants to live.” He adds of his children, “Currently it is their consensus that Lachlan will take over.
Yet he is hardly Australian. He was born in London in 1971 but grew up in New York. It was a wholly upper-class, establishment-liberal Eastern establishment, to be sure—American upbringing. Dalton and Trinity, in Manhattan. Then Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts. Then Princeton. One of Wendi’s first impressions of the Murdoch family is that they’re always kissing each other and saying, “I love you.”
Counter-intuitively, James’s diffidence or contrariness, his relative shunning of the family business, is what seems to have paid off. At 15, while working for thein Sydney, he was famously snapped sleeping during a press conference, and the photo appeared in the rivalA bleached-blond hipster, with various piercings, he drops out of Harvard in his junior year, after spending time in Rome, vaguely thinking about a career as an archaeologist.
Around this time, inside News Corp., James becomes “the real thing.” Among the reasons James has come to be described in this language is that he is not his brother. The private wedding, a year after Lachlan’s Australian royal-styled affair, was something of a reunion for the family. Wendi and Rupert attended, as did Anna and her new husband, financier William Mann. Dame Elisabeth made the trip from Australia. James read a poem by Pablo Neruda to his bride, and Kathryn responded by quoting James Joyce.endi’s first child with Rupert, Grace, is born in New York in 2001.
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.And yet there’s an ordinariness to it. Rupert Murdoch is a man obviously burdened by family issues; equally, his children are burdened by a complicated and demanding father.
It’s one reason Wendi’s arrival at the Star TV offices in Hong Kong in 1996 is so memorable: she’s actually Chinese.s account, Wendi Deng is an amoral Chinese girl, without prospects, who uses sex and various manipulative skills to seize convenient opportunities—opportunities that she jettisons as soon as better opportunities become available.
Almost immediately, the Jake Cherry situation blows up. Here’s the narrow view of even the most sensitive 19-year-old, not to mention one remote from family, country, language: This is just my life happening to me. Obviously—judging from the story’s outcome—she takes on new roles with some ease. The new adventure begins, and she’s open to it—she gets into it, she conforms to it.
It is just because, out of all the women in the world, it is she who ends up married to Rupert Murdoch that we—orimpute Machiavellian method, and systematic amorality, to her upwardly mobile progress. “To be honest, a lot of the young Chinese executives we were developing,” Star C.E.O. Gary Davey, one of those who encouraged her to go back to Yale, will later recall, “often lacked the courage and initiative that it takes to persistently pursue an opportunity. Very smart people, but there’s a natural shyness to them, whereas Wendi, I mean, she had no fear of anything.”
One of the richest and most powerful men on earth, believing he’s about to age out of his reason for being—at the same time he’s looking desperately, inchoately, and not necessarily successfully for new worlds to conquer —finds himself with a young woman.
He continues to deny that there’s anybody else. He will continue, officially, with great difficulty, to deny that Wendi precipitated the split. While such action may seem radically out of character, this is mostly because it involves a woman. Otherwise, it’s very much in character. He closes things off. If he has to sell a business, it’s gone and forgotten. When it comes time to fire a close associate, it doesn’t leave an emotional hole. If he fastens on some new notion or approach or point of view or direction or opportunity, he doesn’t look back.
It’s only after the wedding that Wendi tells her parents she’s married Rupert Murdoch: “They don’t know who he was. I showed them a newspaper,” she will later recall. “Power of media!” In fact, Wendi’s real provenance becomes a bizarre and active piece of speculation within News Corp. Where, really, does she come from? Whom might she be reporting to? And just how is it that she knows Jiang Mianheng, the son of China’s president, Jiang Zemin, so well? Hmm?
In this issue of great moment, nearly a matter of state, over the trust, a complex, almost historic agreement—proscribing control over the News empire—Wendi is, to say the least, a discordant note. First of all, she talks constantly, without guile or niceties, boiling it down, reducing, stripping away all conceits, formality, pretense.