Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media

Media was a financing game. Media was like real estate.

One asset was meant to mortgage another.

The more you mortgaged, the more you could mortgage.

The more deals you did, the more deals you could do.

It had been said before: If you borrow a little, the bank owns you; borrow a lot and you own the bank.

This required a head for numbers and hubris too—somebody with a big ego who could count. (Although there were many failed instances of men who tried to step up merely on the basis of hubris.)

Such men became the instruments for the creation of vast companies that were—sometimes to a fully realized degree, other times frustratingly falling short of their radical idea—not really companies at all, not collegial enterprises, not thematic expressions, not coherent functions, but extreme reflections of themselves and of their ability to do deals.

Simply, moguls led media companies. If you didn’t have a good mogul, you didn’t have a good media company.

The entire Darwinian process of the media business was not about the winnowing out and promotion of good media, or good companies, but the natural selection of good moguls.

And the whole game was the rise and fall of these sui generis, savantlike beings—around them, you might argue, the business itself became something of an afterthought.

And so, in the nineties, there was the Time and Warner merger. Then there was the deal under which—to hold down the massive debt incurred from the Time and Warner deal—a piece of Time Warner’s entertainment and cable companies was sold to John Malone, another of the media business’ great lousy-deal makers. Then CNN was acquired (ruining that company). And along the way there were hundreds of other transactions, bigger and smaller. Then, on January 10, 2000, Time Warner announced it was merging with AOL. (Days before the announcement, I was flipping channels and paused for a moment on a CNN show that had on its panel Jerry Levin, Isaacson, media and culture commentator Kurt Andersen—also a former Timer—and the New Yorker’s mogul-fanzine writer Ken Auletta, talking about the future of the media. Suddenly, in the discussion, Levin, who probably knew he was soon to announce the largest merger in history, started to talk about governments‘ fading and some new sort of corporate city-states’ rising and how the world would be mediated in some vaguely sci-fi-ish New Agey Rollerball digital way.)

The Time Ivy Leaguers (grown weary and depressed through the nineties), the Warner Hollywood heavies (many of them alter cockers now), and the ever-more-furious Ted Turner were married to some suburban database hucksters from Dulles, Virginia.

There was certainly no sense in the auditorium that this was the last merger. That this deal might define a level of overreach and prompt a turnaround.

After all, deals had always gone wrong, and we all still had jobs.

But, in fact, no deal had ever gone wrong like the AOL—Time Warner deal was in short order going to go wrong. This would be the worst deal ever made, defining not just a level of bad deal making, or of inimical corporate cultures, but of the profound lack of science in any deal. Not just a tissue rejection, but a whole set of doctors who had no idea what they were doing. Forevermore, in every media deal, this would have to be an operative question: Do they know what they are doing? Do they know what they are talking about? What planet are they on? And what do they smoke there?

Nobody knew it yet, but we had commenced a new phase, a whole new era, of resistance and revision.

January 10, 2000, was the beginning of the end.

Book ONE (#ulink_cd6e64d0-8dc8-5a2c-beab-2e2f2ce883b6)

1 (#ulink_b49e64b0-e8f9-599d-99e7-87fd05d32c19)

THE COMEDY (#ulink_b49e64b0-e8f9-599d-99e7-87fd05d32c19)

The media business is collapsing. The structure is caving in, like a monarchy, or colonial rule, or communism.

The handful of companies that control the consciousness of our time are trembling and heaving, about to fall victim to internal weakness and external obsolescence.

If by the spring of 2002, this seemed obvious to many logically minded people, what logic did not account for were the moves and countermoves, as well as the pure denial, that delayed the inevitable end. Logic was up against the kind of powerful men, progressive business theories, public relations resources, and mountains of financial analysis—not to mention lots of charm and brutishness—that make most reporters and columnists end up believing that the moguls and their henchmen who run these businesses really do know what they’re doing and that the next big deal is the big deal that will bring about a perfectly realized, synergistic business condition.

Now, it is not just spin and spreadsheets that obfuscate the real predicament of these colossuses, but the media culture itself. The media, like all social and political systems, works on its own behalf. The social reality—to be a player in the media is to be among the most powerful people of the age—belies a contrary business reality, that the business barely supports itself.

We are in a novel of manners—the pretense is the thing.

Therefore, to tell the story of the media, you have to tell the story of the rituals and conceits and behavioral norms and notions of propriety that hold it up.

Instead of a purposeful business story, it should be something more like a drawing room comedy—not a story about corporate success and failure as much as one about individual need and weakness and, of course, opportunism.

How to reduce such vast companies and so many divergent players to a small stage? How to bring such outsized men with their praetorian retinues into the same room?

The task was to find these people in their element, to move among them seamlessly. To be of them—but not employed by them (or, even worse, sucked up to by them—because their charm is not ordinary charm).

How to find the functional equivalent of a weekend at an English country house with a representative set of mogul kingpins as the guests?

Indeed, if business is the center of the modern world, which most certainly it is, then we have to find the dramatic context in which to reveal its true character.

Let us wait for such an opportunity.

2 (#ulink_c806cf81-ce9e-5725-8152-22b5aa80746a)

MY TABLE (#ulink_c806cf81-ce9e-5725-8152-22b5aa80746a)

In the spring of 2002—in the year of the autumn in question—I received an official, even ceremonious, invitation to have lunch with two journalists I knew from the Internet years (already sounding like some druggy past, or a best-forgotten unpopular war). They had a proposal to discuss. We want to bounce something off of you, one of them said in an email.

And so we met at Michael’s. To have lunch at Michael’s seemed specifically part of their point here.

You step into the door on West 55th Street, in a building once owned by the Rockefellers, and get a greeting from Michael himself (when he’s in from the Coast—Michael’s has a sister restaurant in Santa Monica), in brilliantined hair (recently he’s been sporting a new floppy cut), or from one of the oddly nurturing (“You look great today”) front-desk people. Then, from the top of the few steps leading down to the spacious dining room with good art and many flowers, you see everybody else in the media business who wants to be seen.

I have a table. It’s table No. 5, which is a very good table very near the front of the room. Its sight lines go directly to the entryway, and its back is secured by the east wall (in view of table No. 1 in the bay with Caroline Kennedy playing with her hair or Mick Jagger drumming his fingers or Bill Clinton monologizing his luncheon companions). Among the things I have never expected or wanted to achieve is a table of my own (like Winchell at the Stork Club). Still, this takes nothing away from the satisfaction of having gained a contested piece of turf. (There is a menacing back room at Michael’s where faceless people are led every day, never to emerge.)

Before Michael’s was Michael’s, it was the Italian Pavilion, which in a former heyday of media life had a serious following among advertising and network types. My father was in the agency business and once took me to lunch here and pointed out Bill Paley, the chairman of CBS and the most powerful and elegant man then alive.

I think this is part of the Michael’s attraction: It recalls the other, more salubrious, three-martini era (occasionally, someone will even have a martini at Michael’s), when media was the easiest game in town, when the world was made up of a passive audience and eager advertisers, when the money flowed like gin—as opposed to now, with media being a tortured, hardscrabble affair. A bleak, unpromising, Darwinian struggle.

I sometimes think this is part of the running joke. When you’re making a lunch date and say to someone, “Michael’s?”—they’re in on it. The joke is that all these media bigs show up for lunch and pretend everything is just fine and still supporting these incredibly expensive meals, while waiting for the person at the next table to break down in tears (at any given moment, everyone knows who will likely be crying next).

In other establishments like this—the Four Seasons, for instance—there’s a certain sort of pretense. People in a gated community pretend that they live the lives of people outside the gated community, or pretend the gated area is normal life.

But Michael’s isn’t like that. Everybody is open about being on the inside. It’s like a prison yard.

We’ve crossed the existential Rubicon from social and economic anxiety to an oddly pleasurable self-loathing.

If there once was a media Eden, we are its wastrel and prodigal children with bad work ethics who messed it up and were cast out of the garden. In another sense, we are just unfortunate children, who, through no fault of our own, inherited overplanted fields and poisoned air and changing weather conditions. Whatever.

I have another metaphor, which is Vichy. This makes Michael’s a kind of Rick’s Café Americain.

Pushing this metaphor, the media business, through this last twenty years, has become occupied territory.

The media business used to be run by insiders. People who grew up in those businesses, and people, who by virtue of a certain New York-ism were of a family. But then outsiders, not-of-our-class outsiders, took over.

In a twenty-year period, virtually every media company and every sector of the media industry—book, newspapers, magazines, radio, television, movies, music—came to be controlled by people from outside the clan.

The mogul invasion began—not just your usual business types, but a whole new class of rougher, ruder, preternaturally cunning businesspeople.