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

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СКАЧАТЬ people who had achieved mythic levels of dough. Absolute-freedom money. Start-your-own-nation stuff. For another, it was a folksy instruction manual. Anybody, apparently, with a head for business and a modicum of audacity could make a few hundred million bucks.

      And then there was Malcolm himself. He was a Reagan complement. While each man represented stiff and conservative and un-emoting constituencies, they were both showmen. Hollywood was, ultimately, the point (Malcolm Forbes’s 70th-birthday party in Morocco, with Elizabeth Taylor on his arm, was a pivotal Hollywood-business-culture moment). Both men helped foster the most profound transition of our time: making business sexy, expansive, embracing, even polymorphous.

      But this left Forbes, especially after polymorphous Malcolm died, as an awkward cultural fit. That it neither acquired nor was acquired; that it remained in private hands; that the company was known for a yacht instead of a G4—all of this suddenly made it seem quaint and fragile. The fact that Forbes remained an independent company was not so much an accomplishment as an eccentricity—and probably a costly one. (If the business magazine Fast Company, an unproven title with limited revenues, sold for nearly $400 million, how much would that have made Forbes worth—$2 billion or $3 billion? How could the Forbes family, if they had any head for business at all, not have taken the money and run?)

      So much about the magazine seemed out of sync. The brothers, with their odd primogeniture plan (Steve, by dint of first birth, got the top title and biggest share of the business). The crotchety old editor, James W. Michaels, on the job for decades, only to finally retire and be replaced by another lifelong veteran of the magazine, William Baldwin (just a somewhat younger icon of crotchetiness). And then you had the magazine’s uplifting quotations and mini-sermons and ritualistic pomposity. And, of course, there was Steve Forbes’s loopy quest for the presidency and efforts to restore the Republican Party to its place as the party of the pants-pulled-up-too-high set.

      Like all business magazines in the nineties, Forbes raked it in. But as business became the big media subject, and one of the great media revenue generators, Forbes also got roughed up by the competition.

      Forbes may have remained the magazine of true believers, but Fortune and BusinessWeek (and so many other New Economy comets) became the must-reads of the yuppies and entrepreneurs and opportunists and faddists and marketers and digital schemers and reconstructed radlibs. These magazines were not fundamentally about business but about celebrity, heat, fashion. They were the new business culture. Forbes was the old.

      But both old and new in the summer of 2002 were in bad shape. Fortune and BusinessWeek were certainly no fun anymore. And at Forbes, for the first time, they’d had to lay off staff, sell from the collections (those preposterous Fabergé eggs!), even ask senior execs to take pay cuts.

      So, what if? What if the market didn’t soon recover? I couldn’t help wondering—my anticipation was growing. What if we continue to see corruption behind every boardroom door? What if I and other chattering sorts get to be socialists again? What if the pendulum has really swung as dramatically as that?

      This was exciting: the collapse of monoliths, the end of business talk, a return to a cottage media industry (oddly, not unlike the Forbes company itself), the rise of new (old) values to complement a falling GDP (this really will be weird), and a new, widely shared antipathy for CEOs and fat cats everywhere (Cheney and Halliburton—ha!).

      And it might well be, I thought, an exciting possibility for Tim Forbes (and for Steve and their brothers, Bob and Kip).

      “If the world becomes more hostile to business, it just makes our job easier,” Tim said, with something like irony.

      I would not say that there was, on the Forbes boat, exactly a mood of giddiness (or that the Forbeses have ever been giddy). But, possibly, something was in the air: a sense of renewed mission. Dennis Kneale, the Young Turk (at 44) who was brought in from the Wall Street Journal a few years ago as managing editor to liven things up, was energetically announcing a “Free Martha” campaign. There was a not unhappy sense of this being time to circle the wagons, of capitalism having to be defended once more from the hoi polloi.

      “I do believe we do things right in this country,” Tim remarked, with, for him, a fair degree of passion.

      It will, of course, not be the business culture that Forbes is defending but, rather, business itself. The Forbeses, too, may well take some pleasure in the collapse of monoliths, the end of business talk as a popular pastime (business talk, business secrets, should be the province of businessmen), and an affirmation of their own, standalone business model.

      It occurs to me that while subscribing to the Forbes attitude might not have made businessmen more ethical, it would certainly have been wise on everyone’s part to play it, Forbes-style, a little more conservatively. Businessmen get into trouble not just because of accounting tricks but because they think they’re something more than faceless businessmen—whereas at Forbes, a businessman plays it close to the vest.

      Yes. The arrivistes and wannabes screwed things up, but now the natural order may be righted.

      On the yacht, you’ll have the true believers in capitalism (in their madras jackets), and on dry land, everyone else—hurling insults at them.

      I began an email to Heilemann and Battelle on how this conference could be the first postbusiness conference. That that should be the subject here: What replaces business? What is the new energizing, organizing force?

      What would all the ambitious guys do now?

       9

       BOB PITTMAN— A DIGRESSION

      I Was sorry there’d be no Bob Pittman at the conference. He had become—at least for a moment—one of the media business’ most significant entities.

      This has to do with a certain cult of personality—he has a kind of suaveness which makes everybody else feel so small-time—but it also had to do with function. There was, everywhere, this sense of corporate limitations. As corporations got bigger and bigger, as indeed they all recommitted themselves to getting bigger and bigger still, there came the simultaneous understanding that bigness was paralyzing too. While you might be unassailable, you were also immovable.

      Pittman was wily and foxy and came to be thought of as the person who could move the modern corporation. This wasn’t just because he was a smart manager or a brilliant salesperson (and he was the latter), but because he was rumored to have the touch.

      To understand, in a way other managers did not, pop culture.

      Certainly, he had the bona fides.

      He was attended by the magic of being from out of town. He was a heartlander—not a medialand dweller. This implied a kind of oneness with the great rolling public out there. Indeed, he had an actor’s look—and what is an actor, if not a sculpted every-man?

      He was almost Elvis-like. He came from the South and had come out of radio. There was no more basic American media than radio: teenagers and ad space.

      Plus he had social abilities. More important even, he had media abilities. Great press surrounded him.

      Social abilities, of course, were not necessarily distinct from СКАЧАТЬ