Oct 31, 2008 03:25 PM
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Vanity Fair has a new excerpt from professional media beef-starter Michael Wolff's upcoming biography of News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch already said publicly that the book is flawed, but his problems with it seemed to center on how some of his business relationships are portrayed. The excerpt today, disappointingly, focuses on Murdoch's family life, and some of it is predictable. Friction between the new wife and the old wife and the kids from the old wife! Drama about succession! The only real interesting parts come when Wolff starts riffing on Murdoch's greedy ambitious kids and their Oedipal tendencies:
Prue, Murdoch's eldest daughter, is a weirdo, says Wolff. But at least she didn't want to marry her mom, yuck!:
Still, Prue, at 50, feels free enough to have morphed into the official Murdoch-family wing nut. She gets away with saying what the others won’t, even things that the others won’t think, and she takes the various family members much less seriously than they do themselves. This involves, not least of all, seeing her three oldest half-siblings—Elisabeth, Lachlan, and James—as, each in his or her way, master-race prototypes. Where Prue is short, plump, unfashionable, and rather disheveled, her half-siblings are each striking, precise, intense—almost too good to be true, at least at first glance. (Both of her half-brothers married models, each of whom bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the boys’ mother, Anna—striking, precise, intense—and hence to their sister Elisabeth, who is her mother’s clone.)
Classic Wolffian zingers! He runs through all the kids' thumbnail life stories, which are about par for the course for the children of a famous billionaire. Funniest is Murdoch's son James, a spoiled Harvard kid who started an underground hip hop label before morphing into a robotic News Corp. exec:
A 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. Instead, he decides to make the hip-hop label he’s started in college, Rawkus Records, his full-time career. He swaps out the bleached-blond hair and earrings for a rugged beard and eyebrow stud.
Rawkus is a critical if not quite financial success, with Mos Def and, early in his career, Eminem on the label. His father agrees to buy Rawkus in 1996, and James goes to work in News Corp.’s music-and-tech division.
Now he's best known for being a vociferous apologist for the oppressive Chinese government. You see? This is why hip hop still can't trust white people. [VF; Pic via SMH]
Send an email to Hamilton Nolan, the author of this post, at Hamilton@gawker.com.
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