Dinner with Lachlan Murdoch
Fathers and their Sons
The last time I had dinner with Lachlan Murdoch was in 1995 when we disagreed about forgiveness.
Or, more precisely, we faced off across the dinner table about Clint Eastwood’s multi-Oscar-winning Hollywood Western Unforgiven.
Thirty years older than young Lachlan, I felt I knew better.
I had grown up on Gary Cooper in High Noon and Alan Ladd in Shane – both made 40 years before, in the 1950s – so I was extremely disappointed in Unforgiven .
The action was far too violent for a Western – and the language of the hero (Clint Eastwood) put me off. Especially his line: “I’ve killed women and children. I’ve killed everything that walks or crawls at one time or another.”
I just couldn’t imagine Shane saying such a thing.
Shane only killed professional gunfighters: like the evil Wilson who always put a black glove on his hand before gunning down some poor farmer.
Lachlan Murdoch, 23 at the time, thought otherwise.
Unforgiven deserved its Academy Awards, he said, because it wasn’t the usual good triumphing over evil like traditional Westerns which painted everything as black and white.
Instead, Unforgiven highlighted moral ambiguity: “I liked it because it showed that heroes were just as violent as bad guys,” Lachlan said.
So, given this background, I was surprised to receive a personal invitation from Lachlan to dinner in Sydney … at 7pm tonight … at a yet-to-be-revealed location.
It seems I have not been Unforgiven.
At that 1995 dinner party in Brisbane, Lachlan and I did discover some common ground while tucking into the coral trout.
Our mutual friend.
It turned out we had both befriended the flamboyant Australian reporter Steve Dunleavy.
When I was Lachlan’s age (23), I’d known and admired Dunleavy when we were both reporters in Hong Kong in 1964. Back then, Steve was an ambiguous combination: an investigative journalist by day … and a fist-fighting nightclub bouncer by night.
Ironically, a hero who could be just as violent as the bad guys.
A former Bondi boy from Sydney who travelled on high octane, there was nothing about Dunleavy that said ``employee’’.
He would stride lightly up Nathan Road, smiling, with that deceptive dimple in his chin, a gold ring on one finger, a long black Bodgie “doo-wop” haircut swooped up, and back … always wearing freshly-tailored suits and monogrammed shirts.
Steve moved like he was the welter-weight champion of the world.
Even when he was standing still, I could imagine Dunleavy bobbing and weaving and jabbing straight lefts.
He certainly knew what to do with a drunken sailor.
In the Firecracker Bar where he was the bouncer, Steve would confidently announce his nightly going rate – the number of each nationality an Australian like himself was worth in a fight.
I saw him one night tell a table of sailors looking for trouble: “The going rate tonight, gentlemen … is one Australian equals two Irishmen, any four Scotsmen, or eight Poms.”
These American sailors were easily sucked in.
“Say, Dunleavy,” one called out above the live Filipino rock band, “you didn’t give the going rate for us Americans?”
“Oh Yanks?” said Steve. “Yanks? Let me see? I’ll tell you what, fellas. You Yanks … let me see … Yanks, you can write your own ticket!”
After that, all the sailors shut up and enjoyed the band.
Unable to land a job in Fleet Street, Steve Dunleavy turned up in New York alone and unassisted … and soon became the top reporter in Rupert’s empire.
Rupert and Steve had an instant rapport and Rupert took him with him when he bought the New York Post .
Even though he was now an employee, Steve still never acted like one. But no doubt Rupert was pleased to have such a tough guy chasing stories for him in the toughest city in the world.
Dunleavy was a reporter who so believed in the public’s “right to know”, that in Sydney in the early 1960s he’d flattened the tyres of opposition reporters to get the story first.
Once, it was the tyres on the office car driven by his father who was a photographer for an opposition paper. “I didn’t know my dad was driving the car that day,” Dunleavy rationalised, unfazed by the moral ambiguity.
Working for Rupert, Steve Dunleavy was named in the 1990s “one of the three or four most influential journalists in the US”.
He translated that success to tabloid TV.
Several characters in novels and Hollywood films were reputedly based on him: including the Aussie TV reporter played by Robert Downey Jnr (son of film-maker Robert Downey Senior) in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers.
There were nine of us at that private 1995 dinner party, in an apartment built between the stumps of an old Queenslander house in East Brisbane.
Young Lachlan had been anointed General Manager of Queensland Newspapers.
Their flagship, The Courier-Mail, was created by his grandfather Sir Keith Murdoch to give his son Rupert “the opportunity to spend a useful, altruistic, and full life in newspapers and broadcasting”.
So Lachlan’s appointment was a poignant moment for the Murdoch family.
Sir Keith’s early death had seen The Courier-Mail escape the family grasp for 35 years until it returned when Rupert took over Melbourne’s Herald&Weekly Times in 1987.
The biggest newspaper takeover in world history.
As I sat opposite, asking Lachlan to pass the mango sauce, it occurred to me:
It’s 1995 and this is the first time the all-powerful Courier-Mail has been owned and operated by someone who actually lives in Queensland.
Among us. With us. Driving across the Story Bridge like the rest of us, barracking for the Broncos, cheering on Willie Carne, buying furniture in Fortitude Valley – well, it had never happened … until now.
Even if it was only for a year or two.
Lachlan didn’t behave like the son of a wealthy and influential father: though, as I told him, he certainly looked like Rupert.
“People say I have his mannerisms,” he said matter-of-factly.
Lachlan had arrived for the dinner exactly on time wearing pointy-toed riding boots, white denim jeans, and a soft black-and-white hounds-tooth cotton jacket.
He was slimmer, more inquisitive, much quieter, and with a stronger physique than I’d expected, no doubt the combined product of the hobbies he talked about that night: rock climbing, shooting pool … and making plaited bread.
With his Rupert-like brown button eyes, Lachlan observed each person at the dinner.
It was as if he was assessing the coloured balls on a snooker table.
He moved chairs in and out from the table for the women, served those around him with dexterity, and instead of arguing, asked questions.
When my wife, Helen, mentioned she’d enjoyed the Tom Hanks film Forrest Gump, our host interrupted: “Just more American propaganda!”
Lachlan – who had graduated from Princeton the previous year with a philosophy degree – looked up and asked him:
“What do you mean by propaganda?”
For such a young man, Lachlan knew a lot about the costs of producing newspapers … and enjoyed talking about it.
He knew exactly how long it took a roll of newsprint to run through the local presses; he knew the huge weekly increase in depreciation at The Courier-Mail’s giant new (in 1995) Murarrie printing plant; and he saw a great future for quality newspapers.
He knew the number of films made each year in Hollywood, and for cable TV.
Although born in England of Australian parents, Lachlan described himself, when I asked him, as “an American”, saying: “My parents are American and they let me make up my own mind about my nationality.”
Over fruit, I asked about our old acquaintance Steve Dunleavy, and Lachlan told us a Murdoch family dinner-table story from 1989.
Though already an American citizen, Rupert still observed Australia Day each year.
That year he invited Steve Dunleavy to celebrate his national day with the Murdochs at dinner in New York.
The waitress, Lachlan told us quietly, so that we strained to hear, was pouring wine around the table and, because he didn’t want any wine “as I was doing track work’’, Lachlan reached out and tipped his empty wine glass upside down on the starched white tablecloth.
Steve immediately leapt up out of his chair.
He whipped his jacket off and shaped up to fight me! I was 17 years old and wondering what was going on, until Steve said:
“You know what it means, Lachlan, this tipping your bloody glass upside down. You’ve just offered to fight anyone in the room, and I’m bloody gratefully accepting your challenge. So get your coat off. We’re going the knuckle!”
I was wondering if what he was saying was for real.
Lachlan said he looked down the end of the table to his father for advice. Rupert nodded acknowledgement to his son that what Steve was saying was correct.
Lachlan said he quickly righted his wine glass.
“I had to tell Steve I’d never heard of this strange Aussie ritual,” Lachlan told us, laughing at himself. “So Steve said he’d let me off this time. But just this once!
“Only then did I realize he was just kidding around.”
Lachlan said he saw a lot of Steve, until Dunleavy left the New York Post to front Rupert’s highly successful American TV Show A Current Affair.
When I mentioned Steve’s portrayal in Natural Born Killers, Lachlan said American films and books that were supposed to be based on Steve were not necessarily so.
“Because Australian journalists pioneered tabloid TV in the States, any fictional, rough-tough journo character was always made out to be Australian,” he said.
Not surprisingly, Dunleavy became a legend in Rupert’s News Corporation … such a larger-than-life figure that, back in his hometown of Sydney, reporters and editors loved telling and hearing stories about him.
While I was writing the News Ltd 1987 Annual Report under General Manager Walter Kommer, Walter told me the following Dunleavy story:
Dunleavy got very drunk one night in a New York bar, staggered back to the office and flopped at his desk where he became morose … tears running down flushed cheeks.
A short while later, so Walter’s story went, Rupert made one of the surprise office swoops for which he was famous.
No one ever seemed to know when Rupert was coming, or where he was going, or if he was still around, or when he was leaving, or even where he had been.
No one dared ask.
And it wasn’t something you were going to find out by reading the papers, or watching the TV news.
Seeing his star reporter in some distress, Rupert rushed to Dunleavy’s side and, with one comforting hand on Steve’s shoulder, turned to an editor and said:
“What’s wrong with Steve? He looks terrible.”
Rupert didn’t allow alcohol in his newspaper offices, so the editor hesitated before answering.
“Steve’s crying,” said Rupert, kneeling.
“Yes,” said this editor thinking fast, “his father’s died.”
PHEW! Got out of that one.
Well, not quite.
“Good grief!” Rupert shouted. “What’s Steve doing at his desk if his father has just died back in Australia?
“It’s so typical of him!
“Are you completely and utterly heartless, man? Quickly. Get him on the next plane to Sydney so at least he makes it in time for the funeral.”
(As a young man, Rupert was at Oxford in England when his father, Keith, died in Australia.)
And so it was – or so Walter recounted – that Steve woke up in a 747 looking down on the Sydney Harbour Bridge and wondering how come he felt like he was floating high above Sydney … when he sure as hell was in a bar on 43rd street.
As always, Steve Dunleavy got away with being one of the bad guys, while still remaining the hero of the story.
My invitation to dinner this week from Lachlan was to celebrate the 60th Anniversary of The Australian newspaper which Rupert created when he was only 33 in 1964.
Rupert later became the biggest owner of newspapers in the world by buying them – but The Australian, well, it was purely his.
That’s why it means so much to him. Thus I have no doubt that Rupert will make one of his “terror from the sky” arrivals at the dinner table.
I worked on The Australian for 17 years from 1971 till 1987.
A Collector’s Magazine published with the paper last week printed seven “Witness to History” stories plucked out of those sixty years … including one of mine from 1982.
My story was about an Aboriginal woman who was not allowed to marry the white man who loved her.
The Magazine described The Australian as “family business” with Rupert revealing that creating a national Australian newspaper had been “my father’s dream”.
“He talked to me about this when I was a teenager,” Rupert said.
Then, in the 1980s, when Lachlan was only 14 or 15, Rupert gave his first son his first job for the summer holidays at The Australian in Sydney “cleaning the presses down in the basement”.
Lachlan said he was even allowed to “play around” on one of the old presses … printing the posters to be displayed outside newsagents.
Today, at 52, Lachlan is himself a father – of two sons and a daughter.
He is Chairman of News Corporation based in Sydney, and spends half his time in the US where he is also executive chair and CEO of Fox Corporation.
But today he no longer describes himself as “an American”.
“My family’s Australian, Sarah my wife is Australian. My kids are all Australian. Sydney is home to us. I’m Australian. That’s how I see myself,” Lachlan told the Collector’s Magazine.
When I think back to that dinner party in Brisbane in 1995, I realise now that what Lachlan said that night is true.
Unlike those 1950’s Westerns, our world is not black and white anymore.
But, at the age of 83, I still much prefer the days when good triumphed over evil.
David Mackintosh illustrations © profuselyillustrated.com
I should have added your story was most enjoyable and as usual gave us a good laugh at times, while telling us things we never heard about. How was the dinner?
I cannot understand why or how an abstemious man such as Rupert Murdoch (he must be abstemious to live to 93!) is drawn to a man such as this Steve Dunleavy, his exact opposite. But then again, the Murdoch has papers that are gross tabloids which seem totally at odds with his personality as displayed. Moral ambiguity indeed. Humans are strange.