Vanity Fair Springtime of the Moguls (II)

8/11/2019 Vanity Fair Springtime of the Moguls (II)

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JAMES WOLCOTT

LISA

ROBINSON

MICHAEL WOLFF

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

Springtime of the MogulsBeware. Today's media-titans-to-be aren'tfire-breathing barbarians but cheerful,civilized guysBY MICHAEL WOLFF

Contact him [email protected].
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Springtime of the MogulsBY MICHAEL WOLFF

Beware. Today's media-titans-to-be aren't fire-breathing barbarians butcheerful, civilized guys

At Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., if you're in the innermost circle, you refer to the 73-year-old Murdoch as"the old man." He's the all-knowing father of the media ages-and everyone else is unlearned, ill-equipped,small-time. There's an unbreachable generational divide. And, too, an ever present sense of portent, of passing,of mortality, of inevitability. The end is nigh.

The "old man" appellation is used differently at Viacom for its founder, the auburn-haired Sumner Redstone. Itsuggests impatience, frustration-embarrassment even-at the persistence and longevity of the 81-year-old chiefexecutive ("Anyone," in Redstone's opinion, "who says age is chronological is an asshole"), who has finally

put in place a credible succession plan (of course, there have been other credible plans before this one).

While Disney's Michael Eisner, at 62, is younger than Murdoch and Redstone, in some sense he's been aroundeven longer-20 years at the helm of a great media enterprise (News Corp. did not become a broadcast companyin the U.S. until 1986; Viacom's big move to purchase Paramount wasn't until 1994). It's required a titanicstruggle on the part of his accumulated corporate foes to force him finally to announce his retirement schedule.But that date is now fixed-his successor will be announced by June, and he'll be gone by 2006.

Time Warner, an amalgamation of larger-than-life showmen, despots, and egomaniacs-Steve Ross, TedTurner, Jerry Levin, Bob Pittman, for starters-has finally shed them all. T.W. (having also shed its troublingAOL moniker) has settled into being practically a modest company, run by the diplomat and glad-hander (hehas large, enveloping arms) Dick Parsons.

At the collection of assets known variously as MCA, Universal, Vivendi, USA Networks, NBC-whosestewards have been such figures of media myth as Lew Wasserman and Barry Diller, and triviality as Edgar

Bronfman Jr. and Jean-Marie Messier-control has devolved to G.E. and its theories of scientific management.

It's unusual, and epic, and unsettling, for all the major corporations in an industry-in this case, the mostinfluential industry in the nation-to reach a generational change at the same moment. But this is not just the

passing of the founders; it is, potentially, a sensibility overthrow. The moguls have raised a generation quiteunlike themselves-and now the personality of their business, its main motivations, possibly its entire reason for

being, are in play.

You've got Peter Chernin, the wisecracking number two at Murdoch's News Corp. (he's the hipster brought toheel). Jeffrey Bewkes, the self-deprecating co-C.O.O. at Time Warner (he's the class president). Tom Freston,co-C.O.O. and everybody's favorite boss at Viacom (he's the heartthrob). Les Moonves, the smooth and dapper(come to think of it, all of the baby moguls are smooth and dapper) former actor and other co-C.O.O. atViacom (he's the kid with the really great car). And Bob Iger, the long-suffering number two at Disney (theclass suck-up).

To this group the eager headhunter would likely add Jeff Zucker, cancer survivor and homegrown boy wonderat NBC-G.E. (he's the most likely to succeed); Zucker's former NBC boss, the big-voice, big-eyebrow AndyLack (he's the bandleader) and the boyish Michael Lynton (he's the valedictorian), at Sony. And, not least ofall because they are conveniently out of jobs (if you're a headhunter you always want someone who isdefinitely available), Michael Jackson, the delphic, and memorably named, former head of Channel 4 in theU.K. (he's the aesthete), whom Barry Diller brought to the U.S. to run the Universal-USA Networks television

business (Zucker added this job to his others when G.E. bought Universal), andTom McGrath, the brainiestguy in the business (number two to Paramount's Jon Dolgen) hes the math whiz and the guy the other kidscheat off of when theres a really tough question on the test.


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It's a well-behaved group. Deference is its character note. They're eager to please. It's funny or poignant-thesenormalish fellows, these yuppies, side by side with the control freaks and, often bellicose, authoritarians they'll

be replacing. These may well be not just accidental moguls but the inverse: anti-moguls.

Brian Roberts, the C.E.O. of Comcast, also rightly in this 50-ish age group, is the only next-gen mediaexecutive who truly controls (because his father started it) his company (and because of this control, heoverreached this past spring in his effort to take over Disney and fell on his face). Otherwise, nobody's anowner here. Nobody's a creator of the media state-the Stalin model. They just grew up in it. Nobody here is

personally responsible for how these gargantuan, unwieldy, and largely out-of-favor post-industrial combinescame into being. What's more, most don't seem to have the temperament, or even the skills, to run them-making the baby moguls potential Gorbachevs.

These few companies which have come to control the U.S. media are among the most complexly engineeredfinancial enterprises to have ever existed. But these future moguls are, largely, "creative executives." What thatmeans is not exactly that they are creative, but that they are marketers of what creative people create. They're

pop-culture packagers,Zeitgeist,if not balance-sheet, specialists, of which MTV's Freston, 58, is perhaps theleading exemplar.

He attends St. Michael's College, in Vermont (much about Freston seems offhand, casual, even unambitious).Then there's a stint as a bartender. A year traveling around the Caribbean. A year traveling around Europe. Alamentable chapter as an account grunt at Benton & Bowles. Then eight years in Afghanistan and India.Import-export-you know. Then back to New York. Late 70s, early 80s, he's hanging around music bars onSecond Avenue. His brother has a job at Epic records. In 1980, Freston gets a music-biz job at the WarnerAmex Satellite Company. ("It was just luck. If I'd shown up a week later the job would have been gone.") He'slow man on the totem pole at the incipient MTV.

MTV gets sold by Warner Amex to Viacom. Freston, living through the operatic age of media-businessturmoil and acquisitions and dislocation, stays at MTV. With an impressive head of squirrel-brown hair and

big droopy eyes, he sticks to his knitting (this is a corporate metaphor, which means that, stupidly orstrategically, you just keep doing what you know how to do). This is real success (MTV Networks expects $5

billion in revenue in 2005), but old-fashioned too. One thing done right. Focused. Mom and pop almost.(Freston has a big house with lots of dark-wood wainscoting on Manhattan's Upper East Side and, likeMoonves, makes $12 million a year, which is not chopped liver, but hardly within sight of the billion-plus ofreal moguls.)

His aw-shucks-ism is real. There is, or seems to be, no overpowering need here, no reports of his humiliatingpeople in public (a commonplace media-company activity), no semi-demented vision of a new world mediaorder, and, too, no advanced math skills (real moguls can always make two and two equal five).

Six months ago, after nation conqueror Mel Karmazin (he built up the Infinity radio network, which he used totake over CBS, which he then merged with Viacom) is expunged from Viacom, Freston is elevated, along withMoonves, to the penultimate spot. It's a face-off: one of them will get the top job-even though neither is adealmaker or a financial whiz. (Redstone, however, is still telling people that his 51-year-old daughter, Shari,might yet get the job. The baby moguls tolerate such slights. They aren't proud.)

These are default moguls: they are who they are because the people who were supposed to take over weresacked.

This would be Jeffrey Katzenberg, who, at Disney, campaigned furiously and annoyingly for the heir-apparentob, until his boss, Michael Eisner, banished him (Katzenberg then started DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg

and David Geffen). And Michael Ovitz, the superagent who took the number-two spot at Disney without quiteunderstanding the meaning of number two-he was gone within the year. And Michael Fuchs, at Time Warner,the canny head of HBO and Warner Music, a Jerry Levin protg, whom Levin dispatched. And Bob Pittman,

protg of Warner Communication's founder, Steve Ross, and conquering executive at AOL, before he wasscuttled. Along with Karmazin at Viacom, there was Frank Biondi, who wasn't patient enough with Redstone.And, most notably, Barry Diller at Fox, who told Murdoch he wanted a piece of the company ("Say what?").


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All of the above over-identified with the men who controlled the companies they worked for. They believedthey could acquire, amass, control, dominate as well (in the words of one, "Live it, breathe it, will it, and drageverybody else across the finish line"). They were screamers too. And press hounds (failing to realize thatsurvival demanded they stay out of the limelight). They were all as large, as self-dramatizing, as willful, and asloaded for bear as their bosses-indeed, if they'd survived it would have been something of a seamlesstransition.

In contrast there's Peter Chernin, 53, at Murdoch's News Corp., with a big smile and natty sports jacket.

"How come when you write about me I'm always just a pimple on Rupert's ass?" Chernin called out to me oneevening, sitting at a Midtown bar. "Because you arejust a pimple on Rupert's ass," merrily replied hiscompanion, another News Corp. executive.

It's Rupert's company. It's Rupert's show. Peter-a book publicist and then a climbing-the-ranks televisionexecutive-fits Rupert's need for an unobtrusive, low-maintenance, ego-in-check number two (he sat in the badseats at the Academy Awards so Rupert could be up front when Fox's Titanicwon). Or less than number two-

because he'll never become number one. He's the consigliere.The guy who whispers in the main guy's ear(there is the iconic Rupert, and then Chernin, the Everyman-he looks like a daytime-quiz-show host). And ifRupert ever really does pass the company to one of his progeny (the 33-year-old Lachlan, in New York, or 31-year-old James, in London), then Peter is the regent. But never king.

Except, suddenly, he became a candidate for the Disney job-and everybody got a little frantic at News Corp.What if he wasn't whispering in Rupert's ear ("When they make a decision together, it's the right one; whenRupert makes it by himself, it can be the wrong one," said one News Corp. expert)? Chernin was, overnight,the hottest media executive in America-from factotum to newest mogul.

But corporate character is some sort of destiny. And it is unlikely that you bide your time, faithfully-inChernin's case, making an annual $20 million or so-under someone like Murdoch only to become him (indeed,Chernin is a Democrat, one of the larger Kerry contributors-so what would Fox News become?). You are,more reasonably, the person who has learned nothow to be Murdoch but how not to need to beMurdoch. NowChernin may just be a highly competent administrator and skilled hatchet man. But he just might also be that

person who has been so close to the myth that the mystery and allure of moguldom are, for him, over with (noman is a hero to his valet).

It's a reset-a going back to before the mess began.

Jeff Bewkes, at 52-tall, good hair, great cheekbones, the handsomest in a handsome bunch (such that you haveto wonder what role looks played in this Darwinian corporate survival game)-is the thing that, for a generation,has been out of media favor: he's a Time Inc.-er. Indeed, his father was a Time Inc.-er. A pivotal moment inthe modern media business was the merger of Time and Warner, which happened in no small part because theTime Inc.-ers thought they weren't tough enough for the new tough media world. They needed the Warnermuscle. Accordingly, the Warner goons promptly took over Time Inc.

Bewkes, who went from Stanford Business School to HBO, is a quintessential Time guy; a Yalie with greatmanners-he's probably never bullied anybody.

In the old days, you worked for Time Inc. because it was a class thing. You get that from Bewkes-he's apart

from the rabble. Indeed, that's the positioning of HBO-in a way, HBO became Time Inc. inside of TimeWarner. Snobbery was its edge. (Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Sex and the City,etc.) It's taste. And it's attitude.It's us against them. (Freston and Bewkes have joked about joining their two companies-MTV and HBO-andunking everything else.)

When Warner Music was put up for sale, a T.W. shareholder contacted Bewkes-who, with the magazinegroup's Don Logan (whose back problems seem to have put him out of contention for the top job), had beenelevated to the co-C.O.O. spot-to argue that the music company had hit bottom, and that if only the endemiccorruption in the business could be cleaned up its value was bound to climb again.


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"But who has the stomach for that?" said Bewkes, making the fundamental argument against consolidation andcolossusism.

The acquiring generation will now be replaced by the acquired. Each of the baby moguls has come to workone morning to find the world he's known upended, his company occupied.

In 1986, Les Moonves, the former actor (he tends to look like a guy who's playing the Les Moonves role-thesquare jaw, the tie in perfect coordination with the shirt, the way he shoots his linked cuffs) and former

bartender (with Freston and Moonves, Viacom is now being run by two former bartenders), is working forLorimar (Dallas, Knots Landing, Falcon Crest), which is acquired by Telepictures, which is then acquired byWarner, which is, in turn, acquired by Time Inc. Shortly after Moonves goes to CBS the network is sold toWestinghouse, which merges with Karmazin's Infinity radio network, and Karmazin ousts the WestinghouseC.E.O. In 1999, Karmazin merges CBS with Viacom and tries to push out the aging Redstone, who jujitsusKarmazin and sets up the competition between Moonves and Freston.

The psychological implications of all these handoffs and divided loyalties are entertaining and might beprofound. You become an island. A city-state within greater provinces. Whereas part of the strategy of thefounding moguls-all of them outsiders-was to break down the fiefdoms of the business, attack its insularity andsnobberies, Moonves, 55, the most successful network executive of the day (so successful that he is able toswat away a series of crises-Rathergate, Janet Jackson-gate, Ronald Reagan mini-series-gate-like so manyflies), is famous for his loyalist cadre.

"Team Moonves" is how members of his team describe themselves, and not ironically. It's the clan. Therelationships. It's not the merged-and-consolidated media business, but who your people are in the merged-and-consolidated business. Tribe not corporation.

If the theme of the last generation was to manage growth-corporate growth as well as the worldwide demandfor ever more media diversion-the theme of this new generation has been (and will be) to manage decline. Themedia center doesn't hold: the fall of the networks, the collapse of the 30-second spot, the commodification ofnews, the breakdown of distribution monopolies, and audiences everywhere stealing whatever can be stolen.Oy.

Andy Lack, 57, at Sony, is a go-to guy if you've got a deteriorating situation. He's garrulous and funny and the

tie is always askew. He's up, never depressed-even if the world is ending.

He grows up in the network-news business, which, by the late 80s, network owners no longer want to pay for.But Andy can make lemonade. Under him, NBC'sDatelinemorphs news into a hybrid that can replace notonly news (at NBC they start to call news "nonfiction programming") but more expensive entertainment, too(this works untilDatelineitself goes into decline). Andy himself morphs from news man into all-purposemedia man. Andy is so good at keeping the sinking ship going (or, at any rate, so cheerful about it) that he getsresponsibility for the entire network (which, during his career, has lost half its audience). Then, a year ago, hetakes over Sony Music, not because he knows anything about music (he does not), but because he's an expertin decline-and nothing is declining faster than the music business. He promptly merges Sony's music businesswith Bertelsmann's music business-so, with a little spin in the interpretation, each company now owns half asmuch disaster.

Michael Jackson, 46, late of Vivendi-Universal, is a different sort of decline avatar. He seems not to want to

thwart it, or delay it, or manage it, but to embrace it. This is, possibly, a kind of Englishness. It's the end-of-empire experience. (While Jackson seems very British upper-class, he is actually a middle-class boy fromManchester who majored in media studies.)

After running Channel 4 in the U.K. (from which comesDa Ali G Show, Trading Spaces, Big Brother, Queeras Folk), he turns down the biggest job in British television-director general of the BBC-to come to work forBarry Diller. "Into the belly of the beast," Jackson says: if you haven't worked for a real live over-the-topAmerican mogul you haven't worked in media. And better seize the opportunity, because moguls are cars withfins.


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His view is that television gets smaller and smaller; indeed, that you can always profitably counter-programagainst whatever is bigger; that the decline is so profound, and transformative, that television is really nolonger television at all. With ever more discrete, specialized, targeted audiences, it's print. It's become its ownopposite. Its very existence is in doubt-making television an existential opportunity, a counter-indicated

philosophical choice.

Defending the ancien rgimeis the more difficult task. In that position you have Bob Iger at Disney and JeffZucker at NBC. Iger, 52, who made his career at ABC-the network in the steepest and longest decline of thedeclining three networks-and who now is Michael Eisner's nominated successor, can't so easily draw a line

between here and the past. Everybody else when they go for their Disney interview will be playing someversion of the fear card. After all, Disney, more than any other media company, is built on the idea of mass. Ofuniversality. Of one media nation. So what happens when you glimpse the end of that?

Iger, always smartly dressed ("He occupies a sofa well," says one observer), is the faithful son (first to RooneArledge, at ABC, then to Dan Burke, at Cap Cities, which bought ABC, and then to Eisner when Disney

bought the network). He can't openly turn negative. He has to be more euphemistic.It's the realities of amature industry. It's about looking for new avenues of growth. It's soldiering on. Indeed, Iger possesses a kindof un-mogul stoicism-repress your demons. Iger gets the Disney job if the Disney board also represses.

Zucker, 39, is the ambitious son. He dazzled Bob Wright and Jack Welch at G.E. He took the Todayshow andmade it among G.E.'s most profitable assets. Then he got the entertainment division. (His big move was tosupersize-runningFriendsat 40 minutes meant holding an audience longer and keeping people from going toother shows already in progress.) Then the whole network. Then the Vivendi-Universal television business.

Unlike the other baby moguls, for whom a certain nonchalance is de rigueur, Zucker seems to openly want it -it's unprettified ambition. Still, he has gone two rounds with colon cancer, which makes him ... well, somethingelse. ("The cancer," people say. It's a word you whisper in Hollywood.)

His problem now is not cancer, but television. He's found himself exactly where you don't want to be intelevision-being pulled by a network in the wrong direction. NBC, which for so long was No. 1, is now No. 2 -and even ABC is suddenly rising against it. Such an eclipse can take years to reverse.

So it's simple: he needs a hit (which you never get when you really need one) or the great Zucker has to recasthimself in the role of the ungreat, of the schlimazel, the hapless son who has the misfortune to be stuck with a

bad business because no one else will take it. It's the quality of your suffering-and, with not just NBC but alsoMSNBC and CNBC, this is a lot of suffering-that shareholders (even G.E. shareholders) might commend youfor. You can only hope.

Moguls are hot-explosive, scorching, sentimental. Hence, the opposite of hot is the new virtue.

Michael Lynton's relative disengagement makes him seem not part of the problem. (When he appears on thescene, people tend to say, "Where did he come from?") He speaks softly (you have to strain to hear him). He isstudious, nuanced, crafted. "The previous generation tended to do things on impulse, on passion," Lynton, 44,says, without having to say that he does not.

After business school he goes to Disney. It's the period when Disney was theentertainment company-when, inthe 80s, the brand jumped back to life. After Disney, Lynton becomes C.E.O. of Viking Penguin, which is not

necessarily an intuitive move, a media guy going into the book business. But it's a turnaround deal,rationalizing, fixing. Anyway, he's in transit. He's short-listed for the head of the BBC but, instead, becomesthe head of AOL in Europe, just before AOL merges with Time Warner. Then, almost a year ago, he joinsSony (Andy Lack introduced him to Sony chief Howard Stringer) to run its movie business.

He is more managerial than media. (His contemporaries at Disney include Meg Whitman, who now runs eBay;Paul Pressler, who runs the Gap; and Steve Burke, who is a senior ex at Comcast-all of whom, along with

basketball commissioner David Stern, in moments of headhunter fantasy, have been mentioned as possibleDisney C.E.O.'s.) He's the kind of manager who is invariably accused of being soulless, and a technocrat. "It is

perhaps true that people like me make the world a less interesting place," he says with some amount of regret.


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And then there's the new paradigm-there must be a new paradigm. (Headhunters will say, "What do you

think the new paradigm is?")

After all, the share price of each media colossus is stuck in amber. From an investor's standpoint, all thesecompanies are dogs. The usual strategy by which a mogul would move an immovable share price is to do a bigdeal. But there's nothing left to buy. The only alternative then is to sell-but moguls are not, by temperament,

sellers, and you can't sell if the only buyers are your competitors.

Hence ... the new paradigm.

Tom McGrath, 48, the bearded, serious C.O.O. at Paramount until Jon Dolgen, the difficult C.E.O. (McGrathis something of a Hollywood curiosity for having survived so long with unrelenting Dolgen), was ousted overthe summer. McGrath at B-school in the 70s, wrote a prescient thesis on home-video distribution, and thenwent to work at Columbia Pictures (now Sony) when it was controlled by Herbert Allen (a mogul financier).He is a believer in outside forces. There is a certain helplessness which has to be managed. The maelstrom is a

business condition.

This comes partly from his unmogul-like attribute of having had the hubris kicked out of him at an early age.McGrath went from Columbia to running Norman Lear's Act III, a mini-media empire (when people stillthought there could be mini-media empires) of motion-picture theaters, television stations, television

production, and publishing, an 80s-style debt-laden enterprise, which which leveraged Lears small fortuneinto a big one. McGrath then went to HBO, where he worked with Bewkes, then to Paramount to run thestudio-movies, television, theme parks, theaters-with Dolgen.

And then the new paradigm. McGrath gets it when Seagram's heir and failed mogul Edgar Bronfman Jr. is ableto buy Warner Music-a $2.6 billion deal financed by Providence Equity Partners, a private equity fund.McGrath sees the trend accelerate with the MGM deal-where most of the equity was put up by Providence andanother private fund, Texas Pacific.

McGrath-when he departs Paramount-immediately signs up as an adviser to Providence, which, with WarnerMusic, MGM, a theater chain, and publishing properties in its portfolio, is on its way to being one of the

biggest media companies.

It's the clear path to deconsolidation-or, in the words of one of the baby moguls, to "a significant re-sorting ofassets." It's an irresistible force. Billions in private money willing to pick up the stuff that Bewkes and any

other reasonable person won't have the stomach for. (Of course, this will make these companies cash-rich,which means they become takeover targets, and hungry to buy stuff at inflated prices so they don't get takenover, which is how we got into this mess in the first place.) It's the new exit strategy.

Oh yes. And then there's Terry Semel. He is the chairman and likely the savior of Yahoo, who will be 62when Eisner retires in 2006-and surely too old to be a baby mogul-but who is, anyway, a sentimental favoritefor the Disney job.

For a generation, Semel and his partner, Bob Daley, ran Warner Bros., the most successful of the studios. Itwas during their reign, however, that, as media companies became larger, the studios themselves weredowngraded. Studio heads were quaint, and parochial, and vaguely ridiculous, and certainly not mogulmaterial.

But then, coming out of semi-retirement, Semel took over at Yahoo and, defying rational explanation, turned itaround.

In the world of modern moguldom, the premium has been on complexity. Managing complexity was themantra (consolidation being the soft and hideous underbelly of complexity).

Semel went to Yahoo largely knowing nothing about technology (in the Hollywood-mogul tradition, not evenreceiving his own e-mail, no less returning phone calls). He was supposed to sell the company-flip it. Butnobody wanted it. Hence, he had to run it by reducing it to graspable functions. He was the simple guy askingsimple questions (How is it that we make money?). Into the age of the visionary came the doofus. ("The entire


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business model is about making the company understandable to a guy who doesn't want to work hardunderstanding it," says a semi-admirer of Semel's.)

The implications of Semel's success-a dismantling of the very idea of mogul extraordinariness-areconfounding to almost everybody who has thought about running a big-deal company.

These may well all be faceless lightweights and apparatchiks-ready to run media companies like anyconsumer-product or financial-service enterprise. Their notable character note is that they have, for the mostpart, held on to their jobs (or traded them up), but have not-save for the incongruous Semel example-struck outon their own.

Each would describe himself with some pride, and, too, a little sheepishness, as a good manager. What thismeans is more what it does not mean: Nobody's a visionary (after all, no vision works). We're done with allthat.

In the seven years I've been writing about their bosses, more than one of these guys has taken me out tocomplain bitterly and, even, eloquently about the absurdities and destructiveness and, in the words of one,"leap of bullshit" of the over-consolidated mogul media system. Perhaps none of these guys ever really

believed in it. Many may really have no hope for it. (Not that they'll exactly say this in their Disney interview.)

So what happens when reasonable, logical, sane, not unnaturally greedy, not too glamour-struck, generallymature (mature enough-or tired enough-not to want to conquer the world anew), strictly accountable (nobodyhere is going to have boards or shareholders in the palm of their hands) men find themselves in charge of aworld made out of ego, greed, grandiosity, and lack of accountability?

Possibly, they let it fall apart. n

Contributing editor Michael Wolff is a two-time National Magazine Award winner. His book Autumn of theMoguls, which surveys, in part, the increasing obsolescence of those at the helm of media empires, comes outin paperback this month. Contact him [email protected].

Illustrations by TIM SHEAFFER
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]

Vanity Fair Springtime of the Moguls (II)

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