The Second Serve // Rupert’s Revenge

Seeing as Succession is all anyone seems to want to talk about at the start of the week, and the potentially network-toppling Fox-Dominion court case starts today, there’s an awful lot of chatter about the Murdoch family at the moment.

So we figured that a little Popbitch cheat sheet on the wider clan might help you navigate the next few weeks of Murdoch mania a bit better.

And don’t worry, we promise not to start talking about Rupert’s passion for fanny licking again…

One of the funnier details in last week’s Vanity Fair profile of Rupert Murdoch was that Jerry Hall’s divorce settlement banned her from giving any story ideas to the writers of Succession.

Next to that was another interesting titbit: that the family all suspected James Murdoch of being the inside man who had been leaking stories to the HBO team.

It got a smile out of us because in PB986 we wrote: “If the writers of Succession are looking for storylines, they might want to ask around to find out which well-endowed media heir is so into sado-games that even some of the most experienced and worldly escorts have had to stop taking their calls because things were all getting a bit much for them.”

Dishing dirt on your family first to spare yourself a skewering feels like a textbook Roman Roy move…

There was a point where the smart money was on Elisabeth Murdoch to succeed her father. While Lachlan and James were being publicly groomed to inherit the family business, Liz was out there actually rolling up her sleeves and getting real world experience, building her own media production company, Shine.

Married to PR guru Matthew Freud, the couple became two of the biggest power-players in UK media for a while; poster children of the fabled Chipping Norton set. Sadly, her strategically useful marriage didn’t outlive Daddy.

The writing had probably been on the wall for them for a while though. For his birthday one year she bought him 24 hours with an escort. In return, he bought her a sixsome for hers – with four other women.

One of the things Succession is lauded for is its accurate portrayal of the utter joylessness of being super rich.

Murdoch heir apparent, Lachlan, holds the record for the largest house purchase in California’s history – buying the Chartwell Estate for $150 million in 2019. The main residence has 11 bedrooms, 18 bathrooms, a wine cellar for 12,000 bottles, a 75 foot swimming pool and a network of secret underground tunnels.

It’s the ultimate in real estate. The only trouble? His wife Sarah doesn’t really like it, so she moved back to live in Sydney instead – and took their three kids with her. So Lachlan had to follow. Which means not only does he not get to enjoy his ultra-extravagant home, he now has a 14 hour commute to LA too.

We’ve probably told you more than you ever wanted to know about Rupert Murdoch’s love life of recent – but now that he’s back on the market, he’ll no doubt be keeping his beady eyes out for a new wife while the Dominion court case progresses.

One of the weirder parts of the whole Murdoch/Hall marriage that’s often forgotten is that Jerry Hall was one of the victims of phone-hacking.

Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall’s split was a front page exclusive for the News Of The World. A story which came to them courtesy of an unsecured, unsuspecting answerphone.

There’s been plenty of forecasts about what will happen to Fox if they lose this $1.6bn case to Dominion Voting Systems, but there hasn’t been much talk of what might happen if it wins.

Unsurprisingly, Rupert’s capacity to hold a grudge is the stuff of legend. To take an example from relatively recent history: when The Sun came out in favour of Brexit in 2016, many thought it was probably because of Murdoch’s love of the free markets, or the fact that he could wield much more influence in an isolated Downing Street than in Brussels.

Insiders in Murdoch’s world say there’s a much more straightforward explanation for his decision to champion Brexit in the country’s best-selling paper. It was to get revenge on David Cameron for forcing him to endure the “most humble day of [his] life” – (i.e. that appearance in front of the CMS Select Committee where he nearly got custard pied).

So fuck knows how he plans to settle the score if he gets through this Dominion case with the skin still on his arse.

This week we continue to plough our way through the alphabet, having taken on A to O in previous weeks.

Each quiz contains ten songs, all chopped up into a three minute mix, taking a letter of the alphabet as its inspiration. You get a point for every song title you recognise and a point for every artist too.

Monday’s theme: P
Tuesday’s theme: Q

A dispatch from aboard Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop cruise
[Read on Harpers]

Interesting photo album of cassette case inserts
[See them on Flickr]

There’s an actual QAnon musical – written by true believers
[Listen on YouTube]