Читать книгу Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media - Michael Wolff - Страница 9

NOW, my lunch companions that spring afternoon were both accomplished men—ambitious, high-end achievers who had become significant figures of the great boom.

They had transformed themselves from striving hacks into men of wealth and affairs. They were not just journalists, but had become players in the media business, working the levers of association and finance and business theory.

So of course when they unexpectedly faltered in their transformation—when the reinvention seemed to be reduced to mere overreaching—a certain degree of pathos and Sammy Glicksterism quickly attached to them.

This was, I suspect, part of the reason I was on their lunch list. I, too, had overreached—my Internet business had risen and fallen—but had, surprising nobody more than me, come back from the edge.

The media business—at least if you knew how to work the media business—turned out to be regenerative. The notoriety that attached to you going down could become, with a little craft, the added notoriety that was needed to take you back up.

John Heilemann, a journeyman magazine writer who had gotten himself a million-dollar advance for his first book, and John Battelle, who a few years after graduating from journalism school had become the CEO of a multimillion-dollar publishing company, were now just two unemployed guys in the middle of a nagging recession in more or less urgent need of a paycheck.

At the same time, they were, I didn’t doubt, planning their rehabilitation and resurgence.

Lunch with me, I was not displeased to sense, was part of their plan.

Heilemann was the more forceful of the two, although, interestingly, the more dependent—he needed Battelle to be the business guy, the feet-on-the-floor guy. Heilemann was the showman.

He was major-sport-athlete size—although he obviously wasn’t an athlete—with a stud and two hoops in his left ear. He seemed like something of a sight gag: Too big to be smart, too big to need to be smart. Like a blond bombshell in kludgy glasses.

He’d already had, by the age of 30, an impressive journalism career, first at the Economist, then at the New Yorker, and then at Wired magazine, writing about media, politics, and technology—but all the time seeming way too large for those jobs. Those were for intelligent scriveners, whereas Heilemann was taking his measure not against other writers, but against the big men he was writing about.

In 1997, as the decibel level of the great boom had unmistakably begun to build, Heilemann wrote a profile of John Doerr, the greatest of the Silicon Valley venture capitalists, for the New Yorker. It was one of the first formal introductions of Doerr and of the Valley financial phenomenon (“the greatest legal creation of wealth in history,” in Doerr’s famous, and regrettable, phrase) to the East Coast audience. On the basis of the Doerr profile, Heilemann had gotten his million-dollar advance to write the story of Silicon Valley. Heilemann promptly moved to San Francisco and almost immediately became a prince of the Valley himself, a celebrity second only to the highest levels of Valley celebrities themselves—indeed, he courted and was in turn courted by those same celebrities, famously, ostentatiously, consorting with Doerr and cohorts up and down the Valley.

Once, during the boom, at a party in San Francisco—and during this time everything was a party in San Francisco—Heilemann was telling a small group of people, confidentially, that he had just met with Jim Clarke, the co-founder of Netscape, who had confided something startling to him. Should he take Clarke seriously? Heilemann was wondering aloud. I, who had already failed as an Internet entrepreneur, said obviously not. Heilemann, from his great height, said, with what I remember as quite impressive scorn, that he was certainly inclined to give a man who had founded two billion-dollar companies the benefit of the doubt.

I’d been reduced to a sour-grapes sort, and Heilemann elevated to part of the new, muscular, elite corps of technology intellects—and for several years we didn’t like each other very much.

But then the boom ended (without Heilemann having finished his book—indeed, Heilemann’s lack of writing had become legendary too) and since then there had been no reason for us not to get along. It was possible that some of the same kind of credit that Heilemann awarded Clarke for founding two billion-dollar companies now accrued to me for getting out (even if by failure) of the technology business before the bust.

If Heilemann was too large and imposing to be a mere journalist, his cohort Battelle—Heilemann and Battelle were often billed as a Stan and Ollie or Lewis and Martin combo in Silicon Valley—was too handsome. He was distracted, it sometimes seemed, in the particular way of a too-handsome person—concentrating on people looking at him, rather than concentrating on other people.

Partly because of his distraction, and his failure to ever make eye contact, I had no real insight into whether he was secretly thoughtful or genuinely obtuse. His pure momentum, the imperviousness of the way he moved ever forward, might mean there was another dimension here—or not.

If there was anyone who had been close to achieving a version of professional perfection, even in an era when so many people had been close to achieving that, it was Battelle.

He had lost his no-hitter on the last at-bat.

He’d come out of journalism school at Berkeley in the early nineties to become the number two on the launch of Wired magazine. After a period of wild success, when Wired was thought to be worth many hundreds of millions of dollars and Battelle himself worth various millions, he had then started the Industry Standard, a business magazine about the Internet, promoting himself from mere editorial type to CEO and publisher. I cannot recall anyone initially thinking the magazine had any promise. (I briefly wrote a column for the magazine, while at the same time thinking it had no promise—and figuring that, as soon as I could, I had better find something else.) But the Standard promptly became the most successful magazine of all time in the quickest amount of time, before it, too, crashed—with Battelle being arguably responsible for both its great success and inevitable failure.

Heilemann and Battelle were badly beaten up—but standing. Their wounds contributed to a certain dashingness (a lasting stiffness in the leg, and hint of a limp).

At any rate, here they were, both of them fully aware that everyone else was aware of their hubris and fall, formally calling on me, someone they had reason to believe might be taking some pleasure in their circumstances.

Heilemann began the specific business presentation.

Heilemann is an inarticulate monologist. He can’t stop talking, can’t find a clear way to an end point. He is always restating. There’s a constant quest for synonyms, for adjectives, for new ways to emphasize. It’s a form of buildup, of preface, of drumroll:

He and Battelle were going to hold a conference.

They had together staged some of the most grandiose gatherings of the technology boom, and now… drums… they were back, planning the biggest, the best, the mother of all media conferences. The greatest meeting of media moguls and bigshots ever!

It was nearly Barnum-esque in the telling.

Now, I have been to so many conferences—as many as twelve a year for as much as fifteen years—and there have been so many more that I have managed to avoid going to (while conferences were built on the idea of exclusivity, their sheer numbers made it really hard to make the exclusivity argument anymore—although, of course, conference organizers did), that I was not, at that moment with Heilemann and Battelle, thinking the conference, this conference, might be the perfect setting for my weekend of media moguls.

Instead, I was thinking, Not another fucking conference.

Of course, I knew what was in it for Battelle and Heilemann.

The money could be very good. In the boom years, you could do four or five or six hundred people at a conference like this, for three or four or five thousand dollars a head, with your talent, your presenters, your headliners even, getting nothing whatsoever—which was, I knew, the deal they were going to cut with me (the economic principle was that participants benefited from the same association that everyone else benefited from, that a good conference supplied new and valuable connections to everyone who went). Indeed, if you got a conference going, got on people’s schedules, a once-or-twice-a-year sort of thing, you had a sure multimillion-dollar annuity.

What’s more, there was an opening in the market niche. For twelve years, the TED conference (technology, entertainment, design), held in Monterey, California, had been a vital date on the media-technology-communications complex calendar. It was the big one, regularly attracting nearly a thousand people, at $4,000 a head, with sponsors covering many of the underlying costs—and a staff, functionally, of one. Richard Saul Wurman, a Sydney Green-street figure, ran the conference and every year collected the $4 million or so; the educated guess was that his profit margin might have been as high as 75 or 80 percent. But now he had sold the conference—and whether or not the new owners could do it as well was far from clear. If you could take that place, you could build yourself a powerful base of operations in the media world.

This is where Battelle stepped in. He explained the money part.

It occurred to me that that’s what Battelle did now. That this was perhaps all that interested him: the deal. He knew, better than most—as well as any banker, or mogul—that you lived and died on the basis of the deal. The deal was the force.

The deal was this: Quadrangle, a New York—based investment fund specializing in the media industry, was backing the conference, to be called Foursquare, which would be a partnership among Heilemann and Battelle and Quadrangle. And while, ideally, this was to be a moneymaking enterprise, Quadrangle would absorb any deficit. (Of course, I knew that if Quadrangle was accepting the losses, it was a far from equal partnership, if it was a partnership at all.) What’s more, Quadrangle was contributing its influence to attract the desirable level of speakers and participants.

This made sense. If no one at all paid to attend, if everyone became an invited guest, this was still an acceptable marketing cost for Quadrangle. Everyone they’d ever want to do business with would be a captive audience for three days. The Quadrangle guys would be able to strut their stuff.

But lest this appear to be just a marketing ploy, bankers sucking up to prospective clients, Battelle argued the opposite point:

“This isn’t just schmooze. There’ll be schmooze, but this is an editorially driven conference. We want to tell a story. What we want is for journalists to be interviewing and questioning the seniormost executives in the industry. So this isn’t just guys, like in most conferences, giving sales pitches and the usual patter, this is people with information being questioned by people who know how to get information.”

This is the pitch, I realized, they had sold the Quadrangle people. It was a serious affair—a serious affair with money.

“So what do you think,” Heilemann asked, “is going to happen? Go wide. What are the trends? What’s the—”

“I think everything is going to collapse.”

“Everything? Beyond AOL Time Warner?”

“Certainly Disney and Vivendi are totally fucked.”

“Messier,” said Battelle, naming the Vivendi chairman, “is on board to speak at the conference.”

“Really?” Messier was surely doomed, yet I was impressed that they had gotten him. I had been wanting to meet him. He was even more interesting, I thought, a greater “get” because he was out there in free fall.

“And Viacom is obviously an armed camp and can’t last after Sumner—” Sumner Redstone, Viacom’s 79-year-old chairman and controlling shareholder, was in a standoff with his handpicked successor, Mel Karmazin. “The same thing for News Corp.—it’s not a company that makes any sense whatsoever without Murdoch.”

This hypothesis—predicting the inevitable collapse of the five megamedia-opolises which dominated the industry—was as workable a theme as any.

It was 1914 in Europe.

“What about Bertelsmann?”

“Totally fucked.”

It was some measure of both the peculiar nature and commonplace self-loathing of the media business that you could hold an industry conference and be relatively nonchalant about proposing that the industry was going to implode. On the other hand, it was part of the conceit here that this was a kind of true congress, at which representatives would converge and we would discuss the future of media nations.

“Can we interest you? Who would you like to do? If you did a one-on-one, an interview on stage, who would you like to do?”

It was a time to grab a big enchilada. It was certainly no time to be modest. There weren’t that many enchiladas.

It was Diller or Murdoch.

Because more mystery attended them, more cult of personality, more secret of success, more mogul history, the interviews with Murdoch and Diller would be the big draws of the conference. What’s more, if you could do it right, cannily and subtly, and have them reveal themselves—that would be a score.

Their existence, it seemed to me, had never been adequately explained. Murdoch certainly had held more power longer than anyone else—from his arrival in the U.S. in 1976 to now, he had just kept growing, just kept becoming more and more significant. As for Diller, he may just have defied more conventions of power than anyone else. And it often struck me he was doing this with a certain humor or irony, which might be the ultimate defiance of the power convention.

“If I could face either Diller or Murdoch I would certainly be interested—definitely count me in.”