On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television Godzilla vs. King Kong By Marvin Kitman DECEMBER was media mogul month in publishing.Two major Christmas gifts were put out for media mogul fans like myself—and one of...
...I’m not making that up...
...Maybe it had something to do with his habit of climbing on the shrink's desk, as he often did conducting business negotiations...
...To mogul devotees it was Godzilla vs...
...Both had paternal problems that left burrs on their saddles, spurring them on to outdo successful fathers who had little confidence in their sons’ ability to preside over the business they left behind...
...But protocol has required me to respond "You may be right, Mr...
...He was as fascinating as the Quotron that replaced the William S. Paley administration's works of art on the walls at Black Rock...
...Later on, if he wanted to stay home during summer vacation, Daddy made him pay rent...
...But in Turner's case there is another defect...
...And how Ted went where no media mogul had gone before, using borrowed money when all the fat cat commercial networks with their news divisions refused to partner with him...
...Nobody ever did that before...
...Murdoch...
...CNN...
...His biggest coup was dumping the Tories and their Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, for Labor’s Tony Blair...
...He struck me as a semidemented opinionated newsman who offered an alternative to the fake objectivity of standard TV news, and now he seems completely demented...
...Much is said though, about Ted's passion for sailing...
...What is unique about this book is how Ted comes across as the father of the year and husband of the century, as well as the most creative entrepreneurial genius in visual media since Vladimir ? worykin and Philo T. Farnsworth...
...AWWRIGHT...
...Some might think it was his colorization of black and white classics, a cultural event he is very proud of...
...It was better than any program on either of their TV networks...
...A tall man, Ted as was his way, kept looking over my head searching the crowd with his twin periscope eyes for a new addition to his exclusive "Mile High Club," the lucky women who get to sleep with the next Charles Foster Kane on his private jet as it wings somewhere around the world...
...Murdoch...
...Most, I suspect, would cite the birthing of CNN, the first all-news channel, with midwife Reese Schoenfeld— whose having thought of the enterprise is not maximized...
...I know how he feels...
...If I had my druthers, would I rather be stuck on a desert island with The Mouth of the South or The Lizard of Oz...
...Anything about Murdoch lights up us media folk as predictably as sticking a finger in a live socket...
...Most of the magnates I have covered in my 3 7 years on the TV beat were corporate types shielded by cordons of flacks paid to make their chiefs look good or better...
...That's me...
...The frugal Loews Hotels owner, it was said carried bags for guests to cut costs on bellhops...
...I wrote the definitive fair and balanced biography of the nation's leading cable news journalist (The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill ? 'Reilly) last year...
...He is the quintessential planet-hugger, a do-gooder on the grand scale who has put his money where his big mouth is...
...That, ironically, may be the problem with his new work, a memoircum-autobiography I have been waiting for since those two great Americans, Simon & Schuster, gave him a hefty $ 1.8 million advance in June 1986 dollars...
...Why did he go along with it...
...It's called tough love...
...He was the one who had a bust of Lenin on the mantelpiece in his rooms on the quadrangle, which he displayed in the front window to celebrate Vladimir Ilyich’s birthday...
...There was the long-awaited (four years in the making) Ted Turner autobiography, Call Me Ted (Grand Central, 433 pp., $30.00), and the even more anticipated hot new biography by Michael Wolff, The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret Life of Rupert Murdoch (Broadway Books, 446 pp., $34.00...
...Certainly it wouldn't be Mr...
...I own it...
...And Lord of the Smoke Rings Larry Tisch, the cigarette tycoon who preceded Redstone at the Tiffany Network...
...Tom Snyder pushed his head in the carpet until he apologized...
...Call Me Ted tells you about the author's love for Gone with the Wind and that Ted can recite the second scene's dialogue by heart...
...In his latest country of citizenship he started out slowly, picking mayors, and already has two shrunken heads on his belt, New York's Edward I. Koch and Rudolph W. Giuliani...
...Every venue—whether a press conference, industry panel, cocktail party, Humanitarian of the Year dinner—was a favorite place to speak his mind...
...ButTrollope also dwelt inordinately on his favorite sport, fox hunting, another pastime I will never be attemping...
...No wonder "The Boss," as he is formally known, has not stopped his hirelings from crowing on the cable news dung hill about Fox News being Number One for the last 29 quarters...
...I've watched it 100 times...
...I had been interviewing him at an "industry function," the euphemism for a cocktail party, about how his erstwhile partner had added insult to financial injury (his fortune would soon go from 10 to two billion...
...My game plan was to own everything from bottom to top...
...Ted was different...
...Everybody knows, for example, that Ted Turner began his rise to the top of the other dung hill that is infotainment with a couple of Mickey Mouse UHF stations somewhere in darkest Georgia...
...He was never boring...
...It's the only way you can tell if a man is trustworthy, the boss explains...
...In what might be termed the fin de siècle of telecommunications history, Tu r ner and Murdoch were the principal combatants in a struggle for control of the media...
...And I started the first global news network...
...It was a thrilling fight to the finish to determine who would be the next Citizen Kane, a movie Ted reveals he also owns...
...But I had to read elsewhere of the advice his daddy gave him about the ad game: "You know, I grew up with advertisers...
...Hey, I was married to a beautiful movie star [Jane Fonda...
...Ted's favorite indoor sport is sex, and his life's goal appears to be dating every Playboy calendar girl of the month...
...Not to run for political office, as in the case of Charles Foster Kane...
...He seems to report every sailboat race he has been in, which made me seasick...
...Or to build opera houses for his floozies...
...Both believe vigorously in the economic principle of not using their own money for financing the wild and crazy orgies of spending for media properties...
...Ted majored in drinking and sex at Brown, with a minor in yachting...
...Or perhaps only to Atlanta...
...For Rupert owning newspapers, magazine chains, publishing houses, television stations, and satellite TV systems on three continents means having power...
...There is nothing that earth-shattering in Turner's book...
...Through the 1990s both of them were like wrestlers on WWF Smackdown on Murdoch’s UPN...
...What was his shrink thinking...
...Turner wants to use his money to save the world...
...Not only doesn't he say anything, but he says it in Australian...
...They had to fill in the missing words in sentences like, "Frankly...
...It hurt daddy more than Ted who was required to beat him in turn...
...It was the only book ever to say anything good about him, except for the seven he wrote about himself...
...I am totally embarrassed by the paperback edition of my book, just issued by the publisher (St...
...It was useful to have the two books come out at the same time...
...This isn't a daddy dearest story...
...It humbled me...
...I had the most incredible run in human history," Ted once almost told me...
...Oversaturated with the Mouth of the South folklore on the Turner shelf, I keep thinking of all the wonderful stories Burke the censor left out...
...So Rupert and I have something in common...
...King Kong, which Ted tells us he owns...
...I have been in his company at pre ss events and always find him confounding...
...So what I've quoted was Ted expostulating on Charlie Rose...
...Pushed me out of my own company...
...READING the two books, a question ran through my mind...
...But Murdoch's discomfort is especially electrifying because Fox News and ? ' Reilly are his maj or contributions to American journalism...
...Ted is easily understood without subtitles, even on tape, despite his Southern accent...
...But both wanted to make more money than their fathers, neither of whom lived below the poverty line...
...He will finally reach his goal when everybody knows he hand-picked not just a senator or governor but a President...
...I was sitting on top of the world...
...That is not to say there aren'tnuggets of gold buried in the oftheard dross for scholars of Turnermania like myself...
...These charges have included the colorless Viacom/CBS boss Sumner Redstone, whose fights with his daughter are not quite King Lear dramas...
...Rupert would hit Turner over the head with a verbal chair, and then would cry foul when Ted struck a low blow by calling him “a Hitler...
...So many volumes have been written about these media war heroes they serve as bookends on the Murdoch-Turner shelf of my library...
...In the light of his most incredible run in human history, you are probably wondering what Ted considers his greatest achievement...
...Turner said he would squash Rupert like a bug, and Rupert called his worthy adversary a Communist, or sometimes a socalistical Communist, the worst kind...
...He also ran for student council president as a Marxist-Leninist, and lost...
...My daddy said if your advertiser wants a blow job, you get down on your knees...
...Rupert was a leading Leftist at Oxford...
...Every six months or so he would loosen his tie and mouth and tell public television viewers more than they ever wanted to know about his world...
...But they are noteworthy anyway...
...That curled the hair of his audience at a Savannah women's club luncheon...
...I don't give a . . ." Only harder ones...
...As champion of the Green movement, Ted was telling inconvenient truths about the environment and global warming even before AI Gore got his Oscar...
...He had to listen to his tapes over and over, he confessed on Keith Olbermann's MSNBC Countdown, to figure out what actually was said...
...With his several million acres in six states, he has become the buffalo's best friend...
...I am a team player...
...Even Rupert is embarrassed by him...
...I learned for instance, that Ted always wears slip-ons because he considers lace-up shoes a waste of an executive's time...
...How did I know that rat Jerry Levin was going to fire me...
...I mean in sports with a baseball team [the Atlanta Braves] winning the World Series and me winning the America's Cup the same year...
...Ted didn't actually tell me all ofthat directly...
...Losing my job, losing my fortune, and having other problems of significant magnitude brought me down off my high horse...
...The book also divulges many secrets of Turner's success, such as the importance of selling ads in the TV business...
...What are banks for, they both argue, if not to lend money...
...Neither did he...
...Not only does he insist he is never medicated now, settling an open question, but he goes so far as to say his psychotherapist incorrectly prescribed lithium in the early days...
...Have you seen the movie...
...I never understood a word...
...Then the planet...
...He was candid outrageous, zany, completely unpredictable...
...Media tycoon John Malone, a contributor to a running series of what the book calls "A Ted Story," says Ted even crawled on his floor like a dog to make a point about a proposed deal...
...I love movies...
...His loving father beat him regularly like a gong...
...King Kong By Marvin Kitman DECEMBER was media mogul month in publishing.Two major Christmas gifts were put out for media mogul fans like myself—and one of them, for reasons I will explain later, proved to be a lump of coal in my stocking...
...The biggest revelation resulting from Wolff's breaking Murdoch's code, judging by all the media attention it has received is that the Australian-American press lord is unhappy with his signature Fox News Channel in general and Bill O'Reilly in particular...
...A large part of the book is devoted to Ted's life after he threw himself into the street at Time Warner...
...First, the UN...
...And I did it with as much or more enthusiasm than when I first made love 42 years ago...
...No, it was The Cartoon Network...
...Inspired by Gone with the Wind, Turner claims, he owns more land in the country today than anyone except the Department of the Interior...
...Martin's Griffin, $15.95...
...Rupert wanted to become rich, famous and powerful so he could be the man who named prime ministers, as he did in Australia and the UK...
...I kept having the nagging feeling I heard it all before...
...But Ted does not talk about the wire hangers...
...I was Citizen Kane...
...Even Michael Wolff, who was granted 54 hours of interview time with his subject, had trouble...
...He made only one mistake in his life, Turner explained merging with AOLTime Warner...
...Or was itthe second all-news network, Headline News...
...To begin with, they had fathers who died suddenly, forcing them to end their youthful hijinks early...
...Compared with his arch rival, a worldclass womanizer, he seems happy enough with Wife Number Three, Wendy Deng, 39 years his junior...
...But it left me wondering about the color of the black bird in The Maltese Falcon...
...Like how the boss groped his new CNN New York bureau chief, Mary Alice Williams, right in the middle of a cocktail party, and how she socked him in the jaw and he went down like the stock market...
...Wherever, it was hard to get his attention...
...Beginning students will learn that Ted was sent to boarding school by his father at age four...
...Both of them...
...They differ, though, in what they see as the real value of the riches they have amassed...
...I needed one more piece to run the table and I almost did it...
...Others might say it was buying MGM and selling it so fast he didn't even have time to use the casting couch...
...Ted or his amanuensis Bill Burke, a former employee who has the "with" appellation on the cover, have left out a lot of the naughty bits about the author scattering his seed and wild oats in the wind...
...He owns 50,000 so far...
...Ted has always been my favorite media mogul...
...No one knew what would come flying out of his mouth...
...He didn't want to take a million dollars a year for doing nothing until his contract ran out...
...Call Me Ted is Turner on meds, a claim he will be quick to deny...
...Given his open mouth policy, Call Me Ted tends to bring coals to Newcastle...
...You may have heard of it...
...These media monsters have a suprising number of things in common, besides both being egotistical, egomaniacal blowhards and two-faced hypocrites...
...His life has been an open book, a Facebook, if you will, even before Facebook became a Rupert Murdoch investigative journal...
...And my daddy taught me how to treat them...
...Traditionally, memoirs do not have much bearing on the truth, and a memoircum-autobiography is the most self-serving vehicle this side of Detroit...
...But it does not mention the unique test new executives at TBS needed to pass...
...he Turner memoir does not find as much fault with his rise and decline as the six or seven earlier biographies written about the man, the mouth and the myth, nor does it fill in many holes...
...I had the honor and privilege of signing a piece of paper that irrevocably cast my 100 million shares more or less for the merger...
Vol. 91 • November 2008 • No. 6
