“I was very nervous. I dreaded falling in love.” Ah, there goes newly affianced Rupert Murdoch, sounding for all the world like a widow who has previously lost her home and life savings in a romance scam to a guy falsely claiming to be an airline pilot. Dare she allow herself to open her heart again? Dare she, who has been hurt before, permit herself one last surrender to the possibility of completeness? Dare she, 15 minutes after divorcing Jerry Hall by email, clap eyes on a former dental hygienist, model, singer-songwriter, Bay area socialite and prison chaplain – and declare simply: “I want it”?
Reader, she dares. She dreaded falling in love, but she got back on the horse that bucked her and rode off. If not into the sunset, then certainly into the Delaware courtroom that is gearing up for a blockbuster libel trial against Rupert’s Fox News for airing false and incendiary claims that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulently stolen from Donald Trump. Murdoch recently admitted he had known his hosts were endorsing lies, yet allowed them to continue.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Who wants to hear about stolen elections when there are stolen hearts to celebrate? Let’s tell this week’s happy stories first: at the age of 92, Rupert Murdoch is engaged to be married for a fifth time, on this outing to one Ann Lesley Smith, 66. We await the official engagement portrait. (Murdoch was, of course, first painted in 1533 by Holbein, stretched across the base of his celebrated work The Ambassadors)
Alas, this obviously hilarious news of the old boy’s latest marital adventure has been met with the sort of strangled deference Murdoch tends to inspire in journalism. Though not, of course, to practise. The couple have marked the plighting of their … troth, is it? … by giving a short interview to Murdoch’s New York Post, in which the proprietor declares: “We’re both looking forward to spending the second half of our lives together.” Or as the bride-to-be puts it: “I waited for the right time.”
Well, quite. If there were ever a right time to marry Rupert Murdoch, you’d have to say him being 92 was close to it. Though him being 110 would be better. As for what you get the couple who have everything as a wedding gift: anything other than a defibrillator.
If you’re wondering what my favourite part of this entire fairytale is, I think I would have to alight on: everything. I want to hear much, much more about Ms Smith’s prison chaplaincy, the standout occupation in a resumé that tends toward the eclectic. There is certainly plenty to enjoy in her characterisation of Murdoch as the humble beneficiary of largesse from the Almighty. “For us both,” Ann claims to the New York Post, “it’s a gift from God.” Mm. I can’t help feeling that if Madam’s husband-to-be were truly to concede the existence of God, it would surely only be as a regional manager in his Churches division. The sort of guy you’d greet cordially on the annual facilities visit – but certainly wouldn’t invite to the corporate retreat.
Murdoch himself fails to cite divine intervention. He says he first clapped eyes on his new fiancee at one of his properties. “Last year, when there was 200 people at my vineyard,” he explained, “I met her and we talked a bit. Two weeks later I called her.” A post-providential encounter – indeed, it’s nice to think that there is a level of wealth at which you can simply wander out into one of your gardens and the help will have laid on someone for you to marry.
For her part, Ms Smith last wed a very rich man when she was 48 and the gentleman caller in question was 75 – he vexingly died a mere three years later after heart trouble, plunging her into an unfortunate legal battle with his children, who claimed she had indulged in “financial elder abuse”. The case was eventually dropped.
As for the timing of it all, it must be one of those mad instances of synchronicity that Murdoch broke the news of his love match just as his perilous court case was hotting up. In Delaware, his legal team this week argued that Rupert and other executives should not have to testify in Dominion Voting System’s defamation case against Fox News, on the basis that it would constitute “hardships” on said witnesses, and would “add nothing other than media interest”.
So if you thought this week’s most preposterous spectacle was Boris Johnson arguing that a man of his character would never lie, here’s a strong rival: lawyers for Rupert Murdoch’s empire arguing disdainfully that media interest is not the same as public interest. We didn’t hear much of that sentiment when – to pluck a completely random example from the air – the New York Post was carrying masses of detail about the sex life of Murdoch’s fellow billionaire Sumner Redstone.
By the time Redstone himself was 92, this required the active assistance of a retinue of care workers. Rupert’s paper slapped him with epithets such as “horny feeble media honcho”, gleefully repeating claims right down to the fact that the nurse would sometimes tell Sumner he had ejaculated “when in fact he had not … Sumner appeared to believe him, not aware of the truth”.
Something to bear in mind, as the 92-year-old Murdoch looks likely to head to court next month for his money shot – and indeed down the aisle shortly after. Has Ms Smith’s God-given fiance always done as he would be done by? Juries literal and metaphorical will still be out.
