When Rupert Murdoch divorced his fourth wife, Jerry Hall, in August 2022 he made her sign an agreement that she would not give any story ideas to the writers of Succession. Frankly he need not have bothered, because it’s all here in this utterly gripping book. The award-winning journalist Gabriel Sherman has been reporting on the Murdochs since 2008 and has interviewed them all at one time or another, so he really knows his stuff. He briskly covers Rupert’s entire career but concentrates on the man’s relationships with his children and the war of succession.
Rupert was always an absentee father who put business before family. He divorced his first wife, Patricia Booker, when their daughter Prudence was only nine, and she rarely saw him. Anna Torv, his second wife, was so keen that he should see their children, Elisabeth, Lachlan and James, that she made them get up at dawn so they could have breakfast with their father on his fleeting visits home. He gave them newspapers, which they were expected to critique. Shop talk was the only conversation that interested him. ‘We don’t talk about our personal affairs,’ Lachlan once said. ‘But we can talk about business forever.’ The children were sent to work at his newspapers during school holidays. Lachlan enjoyed it – he was closest to his father. James was more rebellious and intellectual. Elisabeth was whip-smart, but only a girl.
Anna published a prescient novel, Family Business, in 1987 about a media dynasty that implodes when the patriarch dies and the children battle for control. So when Rupert suddenly demanded a divorce after 31 years of marriage, Anna made him set up an ‘irrevocable’ trust in Nevada, to ensure that all four children (her three, plus Prudence), would inherit his estate equally, regardless of who was in control.
The trouble was that Rupert then had two daughters, Grace and Chloe, with his third wife, Wendi Deng, who nagged him incessantly that they should also be in the trust. He managed to change the rules to give them a share of the money but no voting rights, and Wendi never forgave him. She was allegedly verbally abusive of him and once reportedly pushed him into a piano and he broke several vertebrae.
It was Lachlan who had to tell his father of rumours that Wendi was cheating on him. Everyone suspected it, but no one dared say anything. One of her alleged lovers was Tony Blair, whom Murdoch considered a friend and was the god-father of Grace. But when Rupert saw the following note written by Wendi, found by their butler in the garbage, he sued for divorce:
Whatever why I’m so so missing Tony. Because he is so so charming and his clothes are so good. He has such good body and he has really really good legs… And he is slim tall and good skin. Pierce blue eyes which I love… and what else and what else and what else.
Blair and Deng of course denied that there was an affair but Rupert believed it and never spoke to Blair again.
He was 84 when he married Hall in 2016, and they seemed very happy. When he broke his back falling down some stairs on their yacht, she spoon-fed him for several months. During Covid they quarantined in Bel Air, dismissed the servants and Jerry did all the housework and cooking while he carried on business via Zoom. So she was genuinely amazed when, after six years, he emailed to inform her that their marriage was over. She told him: ‘I thought we were very much in love and happy.’ He answered: ‘Leave it to the lawyers.’ As part of the divorce settlement he bought her a house in Oxfordshire, which she found had 32 surveillance cameras running. She had to get her ex-husband Mick Jagger to send his security team to dismantle them.
In March 2023 Rupert got engaged to a 66-year-old Christian evangelist and QAnon believer, Ann Lesley Smith, and planned to marry her that summer. But when she started reading the Bible out loud at a dinner party, ‘Rupert just sat there and stared’ and cancelled the wedding. Five months later he married a retired Russian scientist, Elena Zhukova, but none of his children attended the wedding because by then they were estranged. And his executives were worried by all his impulsive decisions: ‘It’s like the king is senile, but no one wants to say anything.’ They settled a huge defamation lawsuit because, Fox News lawyers warned, if Rupert were put on the stand ‘his testimony will expose him as a lunatic sliding into senility’.
Rupert has spent his whole life playing his children off against one another. He would give them important sounding jobs, but as soon as they got too successful he would rein them in. In 2010 he summoned them to a family therapy session at Cavan, their Australian sheep farm. ‘It was a car crash,’ James recalled. ‘Everyone was more alienated from each other at the end.’ Its main effect was to make them realise their dependence on their father.
Rupert has spent his whole life playing his children off against one another
When Elisabeth set up her own successful TV company, Shine, Rupert said that if she let him buy it, he would give her a seat on his board. She did let him buy it – and he never gave her a seat. James was unlucky in that he was supposedly in charge of News UK when the phone-tapping scandal broke and he had to persuade his father to sell the News of the World, which Rupert resented. He also resented James’s increasing antipathy to Fox News and said his plot to destroy it was a threat to ‘the English-speaking world’.
Lachlan was now his favoured heir and they agreed that James must be disenfranchised, which meant breaking the irrevocable trust. So, in September 2024, they all went to Reno, Nevada, where Rupert had incorporated the trust because it offered the strictest privacy rules. No reporters or cameras were allowed in court and the name Murdoch didn’t even appear on the docket. Nevertheless, court records were eventually leaked to the New York Times.
In the end they settled. James, Liz and Prue each received $1.1 billion for agreeing to dissolve the trust, and Rupert set up a new trust for Lachlan and for Grace and Chloe. So Lachlan inherited the empire. But he had to sell huge tranches of News Corp and Fox shares to pay off his siblings, which leaves the companies vulnerable to an activist investor.
What is great about Sherman’s book is that it gives us not only the broad sweep of Rupert’s career but the telling details. His butler noticed that when his boss was depressed he stopped using Grecian 2000 and let his hair go grey. But when he fell for Wendi Deng, he started dyeing his hair orange, went on a protein shake diet and hired a personal trainer. The one sentence that brought me up short was: ‘James had Rupert’s killer instinct but none of his innate charm.’ Eh? What innate charm? It’s the first and last we hear of it in Bonfire of the Murdochs.
Event
Speaker Series: An evening with John Rhys-Davies
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