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

Читать онлайн книгу Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media - Michael Wolff страница 9

СКАЧАТЬ and Luces aren’t press barons (marginal, corrupt, eccentric figures). These are true American enterprise figures, as large in his telling as the Rockefellers and Henry Ford and the Kennedys. (Indeed, the Kennedys would not have been the Kennedys without the aid of many of the people in Halberstam’s book.)

      Before the advent of these people and their organizations, the media was vaudevillian. Here, midcentury, the media, with its ever-expanding reach, becomes both a vastly powerful voice and amazingly lucrative business.

      This is, however, the news media.

      There is no entertainment in Halberstam’s media view. Movies, rock and roll, prime-time, celebrities, as late as 1979, when Halberstam’s book is published, have no place in a serious discussion of the media landscape. Even Paley’s great sitcom-and-variety-show empire is overshadowed by the position and power he acquires through his news division. The focus in the book is the American commonweal, rather than the media commonweal, political culture rather than pop culture.

      Serious men engaged in serious matters.

      It would never have occurred to Halberstam or anyone else he profiles and mythologizes in his book that the media industry would, over the next generation, become the nation’s largest industry because, in part, it would provide escape from this boring civic world. (People magazine, launched in 1974 by Henry Luce’s company—after Luce died—and which becomes the most successful magazine of all time, surely helps invent the new, alternative, celebritified, noncivic power structure.)

      And yet while Halberstam misses the soon to be inescapable and elemental point about the media business, he nails another fundamental point: The media has suddenly become a really great business. He gets the hunger for media. People are eating this stuff up. It’s totally hot.

      You can’t read The Powers That Be and not start to think, That’s where it’s happening.

      It’s like the West: free land.

      The romance of Halberstam’s world is not only in its cleverness and toughness and even nobility, but also that it’s so easy. Anybody could do this. Anybody could be this kind of success.

      It’s the first structural analysis—who knew this person and who knew that person and how the web of connections and being in the right place at the right time intersected with the nation’s changing education levels, its advancing aspirations and the laws of supply and demand—of a media career. And it’s the first time that the media business is considered as not just the story of newspapers or magazines or television, but in the aggregate, cross-platform sense which makes it all so much, well, bigger.

      Everybody I know of a certain generation in the media business read The Powers That Be and took it ever so seriously. Many of us, I’ll wager, came into the media business, rather than, say, government or academia, because of The Powers That Be.

       5

       THE PARTNER

      Heilemann and Battelle had gone into partnership with one of the really deft and canny hotdogs of the post-Halberstam media age.

      He was the senior figure at the Quadrangle investment firm. Before that, he was one among a handful of bankers at the center of the mergers and acquisitions that had remade the media industry.

      But before that, he was a journalist too—which made everything about him all the more surprising and confusing.

      Let me defer to Steven Wolff, my then eight-year-old son, just arriving home from a play date—his first at his new friend Izzy’s house.

      Where I work in our apartment is close enough to the front door to hear my son’s comings and goings. By the end of the day there’s a reluctance and crankiness and heaviness—the backpack thumping, shoes dropping, coat dragging. The nanny cajoling… Just one more step… Just hang your coat up.… Just… Only the most dogged parent would inquire, at this moment, about the day or the play date or the state of the second grade. The kid needs a cocktail before he’s going to be civil. And indeed, Steven almost always heads to the other end of our apartment—to avoid disturbing a father theoretically at work, or, more threatening, a father who might want a sociable chat.

      But something different was going on in the foyer. It was an audible change in the energy level—there was a frantic excitement, everything quicker, louder: the backpack not thumping, but being flung; shoes being kicked. The nanny’s voice rising, control being lost. The chatter level going off the scale, “Izzy this… Izzy that…”

      I almost went out.

      But I know Manhattan play date etiquette. It’s not all right to recruit your children as spies.

      What’s more, children—and Steven has two older sisters who have had countless play dates before him—are not very reliable reporters. They don’t readily perceive real estate or class differences (although this changes with adolescence when they become canny appraisers and breathy gossip columnists). This may be because an eight-year-old, as yet, lacks envy’s power of observation, and it may be too because the differences between upper-middle-class real estate and upper-class real estate is not, in Manhattan, all that great. Most truly grand apartments in Manhattan are four or five thousand square feet, an American professional’s right anywhere else. An overdecorated billionaire’s apartment on the Upper East Side is a doctor’s home in Scarsdale or Shaker Heights. In Manhattan, millions are in the nuances.

      And so, as difficult as it is, and as disappointing as it is, I have learned not to ask too much of my children about other people’s lots in life.

      The nanny was sharply calling Steven now. There was a clattering, and I heard an impermissible flying leap between the arms of two chairs, and then my son was flinging open the French doors which I look out of, over the laptop screen, as I work.

      His eyes were large. His face lit. His shirt askew. It seemed like a vast sugar high, but more profound. Revelatory. It was one of those moments as a parent that you anticipate and dread—when some piece of information, some experience gained on a play date (i.e., the street) takes your child from you. I held my breath for his epiphany.

      “IZZY,” he said, momentously, his voice soaring and eerily distorting, his eyes becoming ever more saucerlike, “IS RICH!”

      I inquired closely and guiltily.

      In the telling, Izzy occupied a Harry Potter apartment. Some fantastic and fabulous interior world.

      Great halls and monumental public rooms.

      A complete Toys

Us inventory.

      Marble.

      Columns.

      Statuary.

      A bathroom as big as a whole normal apartment!

      The most delicious cookies ever served anywhere.

      Izzy’s father had gone to work at the New York Times just around the time when I did (for me it was the Watergate—Yom Kippur War—overthrow-of-Salvador Allende fall СКАЧАТЬ