The Fall by Michael Wolff

Author:Michael Wolff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

12

Elisabeth

THE THIRD OPTION

Not long after Murdoch’s ninetieth birthday party in October 2021, he closed on his $200 million purchase of a 340,000-acre ranch near Yellowstone National Park in Montana. This was supposed to be safe space. Jerry Hall was less fond of New York City, which Murdoch preferred; their alternative life in London, Hall’s social epicenter, was exhausting him. Her children, that is, Mick Jagger’s children, with their rock ’n’ roll heirs’ social life, often kept her out after Murdoch’s bedtime. But Montana was also to be at a distance from his children. His youngest children, Grace and Chloe, were, Hall felt, spying on her and supplying their mother with gossip that echoed through overlapping social circles. They hate me, she told friends, and on one occasion, had sneaked shellfish into a pasta dish, despite being aware of her intense shellfish allergy.

Hall had felt particularly excluded by Elisabeth Murdoch from the ninetieth-birthday preparations and worn out by the Murdoch family’s seething state of political play leading up to the event. The level of rancor among the Murdochs was at a consuming pitch, with each child mapping out competing territorial claims on their father, his aftermath, and his legacy. Equally, the Murdoch children saw Hall as trying to use COVID as the cause to become their father’s gatekeeper, keeping them at bay.

Elisabeth told friends she “did not like what she was seeing.” She felt Hall’s social demands were humiliating her father. He was literally falling asleep in his soup, with Hall’s friends and family chortling around him. Murdoch seemed always drawn to women who took over, who supplied the conversation and the social face that he could not—in Hall’s case this included frequently lecturing her husband on all manner of his lack of social justice concerns as well as the horror of Fox News.

It is a converging line, the wherewithal and desires of one of the world’s richest and most powerful men to live his life with impunity, and the frailty and dependence of his age. How the line proceeds is often about who has best positioned themselves at the point of convergence. Hall failed to secure that spot.

Prompted by his daughter Elisabeth, Hall’s walking papers were delivered (as they were delivered to Wendi Murdoch, prompted by what his children believed were her casual humiliations of their father, including less than discreet infidelities). Hall released a statement saying she was “truly devastated,” but at the same time friends were delegated to say she was “vastly relieved” to be out of the Murdoch drama.

Among the social events of the summer—which Hall had been planning to attend with her husband—was the marriage of Elisabeth’s daughter Charlotte. The background here was, as in all things in the Murdoch family, both scripted by the prerogatives of a billionaire clan—the entire family arriving in England on their separate private planes for the nuptials—and so glaringly off script that no one in the family seemed to bear, beyond the money, any relationship to the other. Murdoch, having

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