CHAPTER 14

Rupert’s raiders

It’s a bad idea to put your self-esteem at the mercy of others. If your bosses have a low estimation of you, it’s fatal to let their opinions creep into your head. It was clear I had to outflank Ken Donlan, who was obviously a lousy judge of talent. I had no prayer of getting to New York if I relied on him.

I first heard about the New York job while doing a good deed. Phil Rodwell was an Australian friend I’d shared a flat with when I was working at British United Press. He was at the BBC World Service then, but had returned to Sydney. I had good memories of Rodwell. We were both banned from our local in Kew Green after the landlord became convinced we were stealing those traditional big-handled English pint glasses — it was tempting, but the truth is we had been set up by a larcenous friend from Brisbane. When Rodwell wrote to say he was coming back to London, I said I’d help find him a job.

Murray Hedgcock was chief of the London bureau of News Limited of Australia that provided coverage for Rupert’s Australian newspapers. He was the rigorous editor who taught me, as a 16-year-old, what a split infinitive was, and warned me against other grammar crimes.

Hedgcock had no opening for Rodwell, but told me of another that he knew would interest me. ‘I bumped into Rupert on the stairs yesterday. They’re looking for an extra body in the New York bureau. I suggested one of my people, but he said he wanted someone from The Sun.’

This information led me to approach Ken Donlan, only to be sent away burning with the injustice of his disheartening response. Realising I must enlist outside help, I wrote to friends and colleagues across the company. Mark Day had been a precocious copy boy with me in Adelaide, the brightest of us all, who became editor of Adelaide’s The Sunday Mail at 26, and was by then editor of the Sydney Daily Mirror.

I drove home to Day the importance of my all-purpose versatility as a Brit with a deep understanding of Australia, who could provide coherent copy to the many titles the company owned. Day promised to speak to Rupert. I wrote to Murray Hedgcock, whose support I could count on, and to the New York bureau chief Peter Michelmore. I sent a note to Rupert, but heard nothing back. I didn’t raise the subject again with Donlan; nor did I reveal what I knew about the vacancy to other reporters. I knew Donlan’s first choice would be Iain Walker.

Four months went by without news. One afternoon, on my way to the lavatory, I passed Donlan’s desk. He stood and followed me.

‘About New York,’ he said. ‘You would have to agree to be there for at least two years.’

We stood at the men’s room door to the sound of flushing urinals.

‘No problem,’ I said. ‘No problem at all.’

‘Ok. We’ll sort the details in a week or so,’ he said, and hunched his way back to the newsdesk. Donlan did not indicate any pleasure at giving me one of the opportunities of my life, which I took as conclusive evidence that my plan had worked and he had been thwarted from above.

It’s important here to say that the act of going behind your boss’ back is recommended only as a last resort, and with extreme caution. It’s great if it works, but if it backfires you’re in serious trouble.

I was invited to the inner sanctum of Larry Lamb, the fearsome editor-in-chief, with whom I had never exchanged a word. His office was away from the newsroom down a silent corridor of closed doors and clean, deep carpet. His large desk was strewn with page proofs, and none of the liquor bottles on the nearby table was full. Lamb was proud of his success; when Margaret Thatcher gave him a knighthood four years later, Lamb put a sign at his door, in type bigger than any front page headline, announcing: SIR LARRY LAMB.

Lamb told me I would earn $20,000 a year in New York, which was about the same as the prime minister received. This made me happy, but only until I discovered the crushing cost of living there.

In New York in 1976, I was the pauper of the Fleet Street Press corps. My peers worked on newspapers whose circulations The Sun was overtaking, yet they lived lavishly, claimed ridiculously fraudulent expenses without challenge, enjoyed the security of generous medical insurance, sent their children to private schools at the expense of their employers, and travelled with their families on regular office-paid holiday trips home. The harsh economies of Rupert’s companies had been familiar to me since, as a 15-year-old in Adelaide, I was required to hand in a pencil stub before I received a new full-length one.

I did cheat the system travelling to New York. Larry Lamb’s office booked my flight and did what they always did — which meant I flew First Class on British Airways. But it was a hard landing when I started looking for somewhere to rent for Mary and myself and our sons, Martin and Thomas. Manhattan was far too expensive, so I travelled the Metro-North commuter line to Westchester County and found a two-bedroom ground floor apartment next to a busy railway line. We had no furniture. After several attempts by me, the office agreed to loan me $800, to be deducted from my salary over two years.

Still, I bought a big American car — a five-year-old Chevy Caprice with two-tone green bodywork and an interior to match. It had an automatic transmission, air conditioning — which I hadn’t even known existed in cars — and electric windows. It was 18 feet long, a two-door coupe, with a V8 engine that consumed 12 miles per gallon when driven with care. It was exactly like those gleaming, cruising cars I had yearned after as a nine-year-old in Tripoli while I waited for a battered Army lorry to take me to school. I lived the dream for two years before trading it in for a sensible Buick Skylark, a car as tame as its name.

Thomas was 18 months old and Martin was five, a finely spoken English boy whose accent was soon lost forever. They came to New York in 1976 and, more than four decades later, were still there. For them, the transition was painless, although Martin encountered early confusion as he worked to shed his accent. This was due to the Japanese pupils he sat by at elementary school. One evening, his right hand on his heart, he proudly repeated the lines he had learned for morning assembly: ‘I predge allegiance to the flag …’

For Mary, it was a culture shock too far. Stranded and friendless in alien American suburbia, at first she wept and then grew angry with me. I had chosen our apartment while she was still home in North Finchley sorting out our affairs there. As soon as the two-year lease was up, and once I had squeezed more money from the office, Mary moved us to an apartment on Roosevelt Island in the East River, across from Manhattan. This was where many Australians, Brits, and junior diplomats from the United Nations lived with their families; Mary preferred the people and the lack of homogeneity. Our dark and compact new home did not impress Arthur Edwards when he came to visit. ‘It’s like a bleeding air raid shelter,’ he said.

Although we couldn’t afford to live there, Manhattan was the magical America I had dreamed of. I had read about it, I had seen and heard it in films a thousand times — the tall and eternal avenues, the 24-hour wakefulness. The brightness of New York, its vivid yellow cabs, took me by surprise — it must have been due to too many black-and-white films.

It looked the way I expected, but I wasn’t prepared for the wild pace. Midtown was an incoherent frenzy, like a beehive poked with a stick, with everyone in a head-down hurry. Shop workers served you with unsmiling blankness — and that was at the best of times.

In a delicatessen on Lexington Avenue, I ordered a tuna sandwich. In London, it was a simple request, resulting in a thin layer of tuna inside two slices of pre-sliced white bread. But not in Manhattan.

‘What kind of bread?’

‘Err.’

‘So what do you want? White? Sourdough? Whole-wheat? Rye?’

‘Rye,’ I said, having no idea what it was.

‘What you having with the tuna? Mayo? Lettuce? Tomato?’

I was still thinking when the man behind the counter ran out of patience, along with the people waiting in line behind me.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said, with a despairing look at his waiting customers. ‘You never ordered a sandwich before?’

When I left a bar, unfamiliar with the local custom of tipping for a drink, the barman’s farewell was hostile: ‘Hey, you jerk. Don’t bother coming back.’ For the same offence, the man who had given me my first ever shoe-shine, shouted after me across the vast concourse of Grand Central: ‘Fuck you, mister.’

I would soon learn to avoid violating these local customs; that waiters and barmen needed tips to live; that previously simple dishes — fried eggs on toast — were offered in more than one form; and that, once you understand them, there is a raw kindness in most New Yorkers.

Manhattan is an island of orderly joined-up villages, little communities repeating themselves mile after mile. Each has its Italian and French restaurants, its corner store bodega, its dry cleaner and pharmacy, and a shop that will repair shoes, or polish dirty ones. Any item — a pint of milk, a three-course meal, an evening dress in need of urgent pressing — will be delivered to your door.

E. B. White’s brief masterpiece, Here is New York, describes it perfectly: ‘Each neighbourhood is virtually self-sufficient. Usually it is no more than two or three blocks long and a couple of blocks wide. Each area is a city within a city within a city.’ White’s book was published in 1949 when New York was, in many ways, a different place. But for all its changes, his essay also understood the permanence. New York is a shape-shifter of destruction and creation, of vanishing streets and rising towers, eternally mutating its landscape and its population, digesting wave upon wave of immigrants of all colours and cultures into its swarming neighbourhoods. It is a masterwork that can never be completed. O. Henry, the great storyteller of New York, said: ‘It’ll be a great place — if they ever finish it,’ and he died in 1910.

But, before White’s time and through the years, the villages of Manhattan have endured, and discovering them cheered me up. I decided that the city owed much of its success to the comfort and protection these ‘villages’ provided against the swirling metropolis, and that one day I would become a Manhattan villager.

New York was not at its best when we arrived. It was virtually bankrupt, its infrastructure of roads and bridges was crumbling, and it was riding the greatest crime wave in its history. That year, 1622 people were murdered; in 2016, the number was down to 335.

A drive down Fifth Avenue, from the heart of stricken Harlem at 125th Street to Jacqueline Onassis’s apartment 40 blocks south, was a 20-minute journey through the extremes of the American dream.

Central Park, Manhattan’s green lung of more than 800 acres, was a no-go zone of muggings and rape; so dangerous at night almost no one went there. Women wore fake jewellery on the streets and carried Mace sprays in their handbags.

Times Square now is a blinding, round-the-clock electric light show of clean cafes and bright theatres. In the 1970s, it was seedy and dangerous, offering ‘Live Nude Girls — 25 cents’, and films such as The Filthy Five and Wayward Girls. Drug dealers conducted their business without discretion, and it was never wise, going home after a Broadway show, to wander down a lonely side-street.

Heading home towards Grand Central after work, I passed $10 hookers, patrolling the homebound tide in their towering heels, calling out entreaties — ‘Come on. You can catch the next train.’ It must have been a brisk marketplace; the hookers were always there.

New York City was full of stories. As for crime, the dread of being mugged was nothing compared with the permanent expectation of an IRA bomb. I witnessed only one criminal act in New York — a youth cutting through a chain to steal a bicycle on Central Park South. It was a heavy chain, cutting it took a while, and people walked past with hardly a glance as the thief laboured to break free his prize.

As for economic catastrophe, the challenges of New York paled against the crisis in Britain, where inflation had exceeded 20 per cent, unemployment was at its highest since the war, and the government had taken its begging bowl to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout loan that would be the biggest in the IMF’s history.

There was angst in New York, but also a determination to overcome the difficulties. Britain was in the throes of a clinical depression: before leaving, I had the job of speaking to psychiatrists for a feature analysing the country’s mental state. Their diagnosis was a nation on the edge of nervous breakdown. New York, by comparison, was a city of vitality and optimism; a sick patient convinced it would heal.

It was also America’s bicentennial, 200 years since 1776 when the 13 American colonies declared independence. The country had been through tumultuous times, but by then the Vietnam War was over, Nixon had been forced from office by the Watergate scandal, and America was in the mood for a party.

Most important of all, this was Rupert Murdoch’s new frontier, his foothold in America, and here I was.

The outpost of Rupert’s American adventure was at 730 Third Avenue, an expressionless grey glass tower where we leased two floors. The building’s main occupant was a sober operation providing pensions for members of the academic professions, which made the 19th floor where I worked easily the most overwrought area. Rupert’s executive offices were upstairs. I only went there a couple of times — they were white and quiet and intimidating.

The 19th floor was where the action was. The News Limited bureau where I worked was a cluster of untidy desks and old typewriters. It looked like The Sun’s newsroom in miniature. A wall of beige filing cabinets separated us from our lively neighbour, The National Star. Rupert had launched The Star two years before. It was a manic weekly tabloid sold in supermarket checkout lanes, offering celebrity gossip of inconsistent accuracy, Kennedy conspiracy theories, tales of space aliens held captive by the government, and pages of psychic predictions foreseeing show business romances and divorces, as well as natural calamities and other disasters.

These two floors on Third Avenue were Rupert’s New York universe. Three years before, he had bought two newspapers in San Antonio, Texas, but that was an act of restless opportunism rather than the acquisition of a strategic asset.

There was nothing else: no television stations, no big city daily, no film studio, no magazines, and not a lot of friends. Nor was there the contempt and obloquy he endured in Britain, at least not yet. Local newspapers hardly mentioned him, and when his unfamiliar name appeared it required explanation — he was ‘the Australian-born international publishing baron’. Rupert was an outsider again, starting from scratch. It suited him.

The launch of The Star in February 1974 received modest coverage across three columns of The New York Times, which said its budget of more than $5 million was ‘said to be the largest promotion budget in newspaper history’. The Star, it added, was ‘for people who find their local dailies too intellectual’. It quoted Rupert: ‘We’re not interested in the publishing judgements of Madison Avenue or professors of journalism.’

At first, The Star was not the success Rupert had hoped for. Transplanted journalists from The Sun, who created the first editions under the leadership of Larry Lamb, hadn’t taken much advice about American tastes. The Star’s first front page was a design riot that made The Sun look subdued. The main illustration was of Bruce Lee, the martial arts actor who had died the year before. A large comic-strip bubble from Lee’s mouth offered four pages and a wall chart on Kung Fu, ‘the craze sweeping the world’.

‘It’s a new kind of newspaper,’ the front page boasted, and that was certainly true. The front page promised no actual news and the un-alluring main head said simply: ‘Welcome To The Star, Folks.’

It failed to electrify the nation’s supermarket shoppers, and Larry Lamb soon returned to London. Rupert briefly appointed himself editor and publisher, but by the time I arrived in New York, Roger Wood was in charge.

Wood was a Belgian-born Englishman who never renounced his Fleet Street habits in New York, even though his lunchtime absences would enrage Rupert. He was a senior editor on the broadsheet version of The Sun when I was a holiday relief. He had also been editor-in-chief of the Daily Express, and never challenged the widely held belief that when Beaverbrook sacked him he sent his money-savvy identical twin Victor into the office to negotiate his payoff.

Eventually, The Star would acclimatise and calm its display, if not its fanciful accounts of celebrity life and visiting UFOs. It copied the formula of London tabloids, where serious and frivolous material lived side by side, and appointed a Washington correspondent. It also ran a political column by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, who were famous and respected US commentators. The Star’s circulation would peak at 5 million, and reliably deliver millions of dollars in profit.

Rupert’s American empire would eventually develop into a traditional corporate behemoth, smooth-running and fairly well-behaved, but the pioneers who joined him at 730 Third Avenue were a wild bunch.

When Rupert acquired Dow Jones in 2007, a company advertising campaign was considered that characterised News Corp as a band of pirates and marauders. This idea was abandoned, but must have been inspired by Rupert’s raiders of the 1970s. They were his American boarding party, an exuberant band of brothers, and a few sisters, who refused to learn the manners of New York media.

Steve Dunleavy, an Australian, wrote a raucous and angry column in The Star. The paper described him as ‘Mr Blood and Guts’, and his by-line included a photo of him with a bottle of Heineken. His escapades were company folklore. An early-shift office boy was reprimanded for calling an ambulance when he couldn’t rouse Dunleavy as he lay beneath the City desk — he was merely recovering from the night before. A snowplough crushed his foot as he lay in a snowdrift outside Elaine’s restaurant on the Upper East Side, leaving his female companion uninjured. He swam the channel at Chappaquiddick, where Mary Jo Kopechne died, to disprove Ted Kennedy’s claim that riptides thwarted his effort to rescue her. Rupert both admired and disapproved of Dunleavy’s life, but people went too far in describing Dunleavy as his ‘alter ego’.

Neal Travis was Dunleavy’s best friend and drinking buddy, and a former Murdoch star in Sydney. When he moved to Manhattan, he wrote racy novels and became first editor of the now world-famous Page Six column. His standard defence when challenged about the accuracy of an item was: ‘Oh, please, you don’t seem to understand. I’m writing a gossip column.’ Travis was always leaving the company and coming back. Once, spotting Travis at a desk, Rupert told an editor: ‘Not him again. I don’t want him here.’ But Travis had charm, and a moment after returning to his office, Rupert called the editor: ‘I was a bit hasty. We should keep Neal on board.’ Travis had rushed over to Rupert to express his joy at working for him again.

Australians and Brits enjoyed the fast life of 1970s Manhattan. Piers Akerman, called The Toad for no other reason than he rather looked like one, lived — as the euphemism goes — life to the full. The only adult brawl of my life happened when I insulted him in Costello’s, a journalists’ bar nearby, and he began pounding my chest. He was a short, un-athletic man and, although the blows of Akerman’s tiny fists were slight and he meant no real harm, I helpfully fell to the floor and lay still until Freddie, the barman, threw him out onto 44th Street.

Ian Rae and I became close friends, even though he had a famously uneven temper and a larrikin streak he struggled to control. When I was news editor at The Star and he was editor-in-chief, Rae was once so annoyed with me that he chased me through our crowded newsroom threatening to kill me. Rae was known as The Pig, no one could say definitively why, and the staff looked only slightly surprised.

Another friend was Col Allan, a tall, stringy country boy from Dubbo in New South Wales, with unbridled self-confidence, a loud voice, and an intense social life. I enjoyed slight seniority over him, which Allan claimed I abused, landing him in the winter with cold jobs in Canada, while I monopolised Caribbean assignments. He was correct.

Peter Brennan, when he was chief of The Star’s Los Angeles bureau, would go missing for hours each day — he was writing a novel and never answered his phone before finishing that day’s writing.

Phil Bunton, an outsized British sub-editor, owned two cats named Rupert and Dot — after Dot Wyndoe, Rupert’s assistant. Bunton claimed his therapy after a difficult day was to go home and kick the cat called Rupert.

John Canning was a one-legged New Zealander who had contemplated the priesthood as a young man, but instead found his calling at the Sydney Daily Mirror. In high spirits, Canning was known to remove his leg and drink beer from it.

Others already established as members of Rupert’s inner circle were relatively conventional. George Viles was an aggressive Australian executive. Working in London, he was called the ‘Industrial Gorilla’ after storming into a strike meeting at The Sun and threatening to fire the entire staff. Viles was first in the office, but by 5pm each day he was reliably leaning on a bar in the company of Paul Rigby and Curly Brydon. Rigby was an ebullient cartoonist already celebrated in Australia and Britain. He founded the ‘Limp Falling Association’, whose members would identify themselves by slumping suddenly to the floor, most often in bars. He once demonstrated this fall on national television in Britain. Brydon had been an Australian fighter ace during the war before helping run Rupert’s businesses, peppered his conversation with aviation metaphors, and gave our roving boss the nickname that stuck for years — the Flying Doctor.

They weren’t all oddballs, and there weren’t many wasters. Among the couple of hundred inhabitants of 730 Third Avenue were serious and sober journalists, such as Ray Kerrison, a devout man and lovely writer; John Raedler, the solemn correspondent of The Australian; and Peter Michelmore, who was Australian but wholly Americanised after years living in New Jersey. Joe Robinowitz was a serious-minded young Texan who didn’t realise he was being insulted when Kelvin MacKenzie, an Englishman then at the New York Post, addressed him repeatedly as ‘you Texas toe rag’.

An early wave of American managers had already joined the company, led by Marty Singerman, a circulation executive from TV Guide who would rise to become chief of all US publishing. Marty became my mentor, and then one of my closest friends.

Many of these eccentric and determined misfits went on to great success. Col Allan was an editor-in-chief in Sydney and held the same job for 15 years at the New York Post; Akerman returned to Australia and gained fame as a dyspeptic conservative columnist; Dunleavy relished his notoriety as a New York Post columnist, was profiled by Rolling Stone, and, after gaining national renown on the A Current Affair television programme, helped Robert Downey Jr prepare for his role as an outlandish reporter in Natural Born Killers. Ian Rae became a leading Fox News producer; and Peter Brennan launched shows for Fox TV before breaking out on his own and creating hits such as Judge Judy, which won awards and made millions.

These Murdoch pioneers constituted the unstable chemistry of Rupert’s early years in America. They were fiery, defiant, adventuring, boozy, and invincible in their own minds, imagining they were storming the beaches of American journalism, certain to overwhelm the opposition. They delighted in the pious disapproval of their American counterparts and retaliated with loud disdain of their new country’s newspapers. It was a true clash of cultures, in which neither side could claim all the right. To the invaders, American newspapers were dull and its journalists smug and self-admiring. In return, Americans were aghast at Rupert’s raiders, who they saw as raucous, reckless, and uncouth. There was evidence supporting both arguments.

But we newcomers were devoted to The Boss, and in the years to come most of us did pretty well whatever he asked of us. We moved from business to business, taking over newspapers, buying magazines, moving into television — and all the while professing not to give a damn what the rest of the media world thought. We didn’t change American newspapers much, of course. Four decades later the pride of Rupert’s American print properties was The Wall Street Journal. The Star had been cast off long ago, and only the New York Post, by then a tiny asset in a vast enterprise, remained. It was still in high spirits in spite of continuing losses and diminishing sales.

In the summer of 1976, America was still Rupert’s empire of dreams. It was seven months after my arrival that he made his first serious moves.

First came the acquisition of the New York Post, a dull and struggling evening newspaper founded 175 years before by Alexander Hamilton. The seller was the heiress Dorothy Schiff, the Post’s 73-year-old editor and publisher, who had bought the newspaper in 1939.

This was the time US media coverage of Rupert began to harden. Suddenly he became a ‘brash millionaire’ and newspapers gave details, not just of the supermarket Star, but also his newspapers in Britain and Australia and their appetite for scandal, sex, crime, and sport.

In this more hostile climate, Rupert began his effort to buy New York magazine and The Village Voice, two very different weeklies owned by the same company. New York was a slick magazine whose exaggeration of the glamour and sophistication of Manhattan appealed to a large readership. The Village Voice was a merciless arch-irritant of New York City power, choosing its victims from among a ready supply of dodgy politicians, company bosses, police chiefs, and judges.

The company was run by Clay S. Felker, a 51-year-old journalist from Missouri. He had created New York, and had become the darling of the city’s best writers, including practitioners of ‘New Journalism’ — writers who applied ‘literary’ techniques to their reporting. According to critics, this technique meant that articles were not always completely truthful.

Felker had asked Rupert to become an investor in his magazines in the hope he would help him handle his troublesome board. He owned 10 per cent of the company stock, and needed allies. His talents as an editor were not, in his board’s opinion, matched by a gift for fiscal responsibility.

If Felker had done some homework, he would have known Rupert was never interested in owning a minority share of anything. When Rupert, without informing him, bought other shareholders’ stock until he owned 50 per cent of the company, Felker felt betrayed.

Rupert’s arrival at New York caused uproar. Bereft at the loss of Felker, and appalled at their new owner’s reputation, well-known writers swore never to work for a Murdoch publication. Editors walked out in an effort to prevent publication of his first edition — one fled the building with a bundle of copy. Rupert, with volunteers from News Corp, produced the edition without them.

This drama coincided with the launch of another film version of the King Kong story, and Time magazine adapted the film’s poster to mark a real-life Manhattan invasion. On the cover, with hairy feet planted on each tower of the World Trade Centre, was a giant ape with Rupert’s head. One gorilla fist waved a copy of the New York Post, the other clutched Clay Felker. The head said: ‘Extra!!! Aussie Press Lord Terrifies Gotham’.

Rupert’s reinvention of the New York Post into a noisy, emotional tabloid caused fainting spells among serious-minded custodians of American journalism. To Londoners or Sydneysiders, the Post was a typical tabloid — entertaining and sometimes over the top — but most American editors were horrified. To them, Rupert and his raiders were plague carriers.

What they regarded as an assault on cherished standards, Rupert saw as a business opportunity. He thought American newspapers were dull and distant, and that they cared more about Pulitzer Prizes than their readers.

He was right — few American reporters understood popular journalism — but he was also dismissive of pretty well all American newspaper people, and that was harsh. As a Brit, however, his prejudice served me well.

American editors never lasted until Ed Kosner came. When he was fired as editor of Newsweek, Rupert appointed Kosner to New York magazine, and he was still there when we sold the magazine 11 years later.

It was just as well Rupert did not need admirers. The Columbia Journalism Review described the Post as ‘a force for evil’; Abe Rosenthal, executive editor of the New York Times, called Rupert, ‘a bad element, practising mean, ugly, violent journalism’. Rosenthal predicted: ‘He’ll be out of town in a couple of years’. The Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mike Royko quit when Rupert bought his newspaper, saying ‘no self-respecting fish would be wrapped in a Murdoch paper’.

When Rupert invited The New York Times to his Fifth Avenue apartment for an interview, the Times reporter recorded a prescient scene: ‘As he spoke, his three small children scurried about in the apartment. The publisher’s young daughter carried a portable tape recorder and played at being an interviewer of her brothers. The children would then gleefully replay the responses.’

Elisabeth was eight, Lachlan five, and James three.