Rupert Murdoch: The Interview
I talk life, love and retirement with the world's sexiest nonagenarian billionaire
Many people would be surprised at just how modest the Murdoch family home is. Although the approach to the house is certainly impressive, consisting as it does of a long drive up a winding country road through well-manicured lawns, and then a descent several hundred feet down into the heart of an active volcano, the house itself is rather unprepossessing. A simple wooden construction, with a roughly-hewn door and window and the words “HERE IS DOG” scrawled across the front in purple paint, it’s not the way you expect a multi-billionaire mogul to live.
But then, as Rupert Murdoch explains to me, after welcoming me in and making me comfortable on a chaise-longue constructed of human skulls, he has never been interested in luxury.
“What I say is, the more comfortable you get, the lazier you get,” he booms in his famous Celtic baritone. “I like to keep myself as uncomfortable as possible.” He demonstrates the principle by stripping naked and rolling on a termite nest.
However, the great man does concede this is not the ideal location for an in-depth interview, and so we repair to his corporate headquarters, a floating fortress to the west of the Canary Islands, tastefully decorated in neutral colours. Here he introduces me to his latest wife, a three-foot high, polished steel dome named Esther Radio. “I met Esther in Belize,” says Murdoch, love shining in his eyes. “I had never met a woman like her before.”
Esther Radio concurs with a series of loud creaking noises. Some are sceptical of the ageing tycoon’s string of relationships, but seeing the man alongside his small mysterious appliance, it’s hard to ignore the spark between them.
Of course, nothing can be taken for granted when it comes to Murdoch and his peripatetic libido. Shortly before hooking up with Esther Radio, he was engaged to Ann Lesley Smith, but broke off the engagement after discovering that Smith owned more than eight grandfather clocks. Prior to that he was married to Jerry Hall, a marriage that foundered when Hall admitted that she was not Rachel Hunter. His wife before Hall was Wendi Deng, who left Murdoch after catching him in bed with a first edition of What Katy Did. Before Deng he was married to Anna Torv for 32 years, unexpectedly splitting with her by mutual consent following an intractable disagreement about the works of Gus van Sant. Torv herself was Murdoch’s second wife, after his first marriage to Patricia Booker, better known today as Senator Bridget McKenzie.
I ask Murdoch about his history with women. “It’s difficult,” he muses, “when you’re both incredibly rich and extremely attractive. You never know whether a woman is attracted to you for your wealth, or for your legendary sexual prowess. Obviously you hope it’s the wealth, but sometimes you can tell from the gleam in her eyes that all she wants is your famously skilled penis. That’s why I love Esther so much: she doesn’t have eyes.”
Moving on from the issue of romance, I question the billionaire about his recent decision to step down as head of News Corp. Didn’t it seem a little premature, given that at 92 and with access to the best in medical technology, experts estimate he could live for another three or four hundred years?
“There comes a time,” says Murdoch, reclining atop a remarkably obedient live musk ox, “when you feel you want to do different things. I’ve had a great time leading News Corp, you know, xeroxing the papers, filming the tv shows, script-editing Succession. But eventually you ask yourself, is there more to life than business? And you answer yourself, no, there isn’t. And then you fall asleep for a bit. And when you wake up you’ve forgotten what your answer was. So you resign, and you take up a hobby.”
So, what hobby has he taken up? At this, Murdoch’s face lights up, and his heart rate rises above six beats per minute. “I’ve been getting super into calligraphy,” he exclaims. “It’s incredibly exciting. When I was a young boy I loved pens of all kinds, but because my father was in the newspaper business, he forbade handwriting of all kinds. Now that, apparently, he’s dead (Sir Keith Murdoch died in 1952, but Rupert only heard about this several weeks ago), I feel free to pursue what was always my true passion.”
He takes me to his calligraphy room, a vast airplane hangar filled with enormous sheets of vellum, on which he has scrawled millions of obscenities. He beams with pride. “I’m not at professional level yet, but pretty soon I think,” he enthuses. “What do you think?” Not wanting to confess that I am more frightened than I have ever been in my life, I say it’s the best calligraphy I have ever seen. Which is technically true.
Moving on with some difficulty after Murdoch fills a huge suitcase with examples of his calligraphy and makes me pay him eighteen dollars for it, I touch upon the sensitive topic of his children. Why did he decide Lachlan was the best choice to lead the company?
Murdoch takes a long deep breath. It lasts several minutes and begins getting quite disturbing, only coming to an end when his personal nurse enters the room and inserts a tube into his back. After the breath, he muses quietly, “For a long time I thought Lachlan was the only possible choice, but a few years ago James built a diorama of the solar system out of polystyrene and that really gave me pause. I didn’t know whether Lachlan could make a diorama of the solar system - every time I asked him to he refused point blank - and this made me think that maybe James was the right one. And then it got even more complicated because Elisabeth called me up one day and told me she’d learned how to make orange juice. Plus, I found out that I have a daughter called ‘Prudence’. That gave me a hell of a shock.”
Nonetheless, Lachlan has emerged as the anointed one, for reasons that many have failed to fully understand. “When I decided to step down,” says Murdoch, munching contemplatively on a lychee, “I called all my children together - except Prudence, who had to wait in the car - and said, one of you has to run the company, but I can’t decide which. What should I do? And I listened very closely to their answers. Elisabeth said, ‘make me the boss, because I have a gun.’ James said, ‘I should run the company because I have made a huge success of my mobile dog wash business, which proves I have corporate savvy.’ But do you know what Lachlan said?
I wait a few hours, then finally shake my head. Murdoch continues.
“He looked into my eyes and said, ‘Dad, don’t make me the head of the company. I don’t know what I’m doing. I will destroy everything. Please, Dad, I am terrified of having to do this job. For the love of god spare me this nightmarish responsibility.’ I realised then and there that the right person for the job was the one with the most humility. I took Lachlan up in my glass elevator and told him the news. He tried to jump out, but I think he’s coming to terms with it now.”
So what’s the future for News Corp? “I think the internet is going to be really big,” Murdoch nods wisely. “I’ve told all my editors that News publications should be available online within the next ten years, and Lachlan has promised to follow up on this. Also, TV shows about dogs are big, so I’ve told Lachlan he should look into replacing all Fox News hosts with dogs.”
And what’s the future for Rupert Murdoch? “Well,” he says, smiling and stretching until blood starts to ooze from cracks in his skin, “there’s my calligraphy of course, and I’ll be spending a lot of time with Esther,” here he plants a passionate kiss on the dome. “But I plan to spend a lot of my time just moisturising.”
As I leave the floating fortress, dragging my vellum-filled suitcase, it occurs to me that this truly is the end of an era. I take one look back at the naked Murdoch, straddling Esther Radio and taking an enormous hit of snuff, and wonder if we shall ever see his like again.