Celebrity breakups often carry an air of sadness: even surrounded by opulence and the ideal life, love ends. With Jerry Hall and Rupert Murdoch this sensation did not settle in the collective imagination. This is what happens when wives accumulate, as in the case of the communications magnate, who was on his fourth, and when absurd details like this are leaked: in the couple’s divorce agreement, Murdoch’s team included expressly stated that Hall could not give ideas to Succession’s writers.
With this clause, the Murdoch clan legitimized the HBO series to the public as its unofficial portrait. And, while in Succession the patriarch played by Brian Cox did not allow any son to occupy his throne while he was alive, in the present we have witnessed Murdoch give up power: he has become chairman emeritus of Fox and News Corporation and his son Lachlan will remain at the helm of his empire, which includes newspapers such as The Sun, The Times, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. And what do Murdoch and Succession have in common?
In Succession, a constant is the relationship between the brothers where one has second-class status: Connor (Alan Ruck), Logan’s son from his first marriage, whom Roman (Kieran Culkin), Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Kendall ( Jeremy Strong), children from the second marriage, treated as inferior to them. The father, in fact, never even considers Connor as a possible successor at Waystar Royco.
Interestingly, Murdoch had a daughter, Prudence, from his first marriage to Patricia Booker, and three children, Lachlan, James and Elisabeth, from his second wife. In the case of Murdoch, however, there were two other daughters of his third wife, Wendi Deng, Grace and Chloe, who are still in college and, obviously, in institutions of the so-called Ivy League, the association with the most prestigious universities. : Grace and Yale and Chloe at Stanford.
As with Connor, who always stayed out of the competition to inherit the Waystar Royco media empire, Prudence maintained the impression that she did not aspire to the throne, after being ignored by her mother and detested by her stepmother, and considered unviable because she is a woman. Of course, she does not live outside the dynasty: throughout her career she held different positions in the business community, now serving on the board of Times Newspapers.
She does not do badly working from a distance: the Australian Financial Review placed her in position 45 on the list of the richest people in the country with more than 2.5 billion dollars.
As Vanity Fair reported back in 2008, Rupert’s patriarchal mentality changed with Elisabeth, who was formed as a key piece for the dynasty. She started at FX Networks, a cable channel that no longer belongs to the conglomerate after its sale to Disney. In 1994 she acquired with the first husband of the three of hers that she ended up having, Elkin Kwesi Pianim, NBC affiliate channels in California with 35 million borrowed from her father. A year later she sold them for a profit of 12 million.
However, after this succession offensive, Elisabeth fell from grace when she moved to London to run Sky under her father’s right-hand man, Sam Chisholm. After a chain of pregnancies, a public divorce, and her inability to work with Chisholm, she lost her father’s favor as her heir. And, while the biography has nothing to do with Shiv, the idea of ??Elisabeth and Pianim could not be ruled out as a reference for the fictional character.
It is ironic that Lachlan was considered so “affable and steady” that he was not “Murdoch enough” to have control of the company. He had to prove that he was emotionally apathetic and a financial shark to be recognized by his father. And consequently, Lachlan made headlines in 2005 by leaving the family empire. It cannot be ruled out that screenwriter Jesse Armstrong took it as inspiration to write Kendall, a son very close to his father, who even tried to steal the company from him instead of simply resigning, and whom his father considered weak.
Lachlan officially returned in 2017, finding himself more than comfortable with the offensive of Murdoch and Fox News to create a far-right mental framework, keep Donald Trump in power and even establish a civil war climate among the population based on fake news. And, like Kendall, she was the one Rupert trusted to give him the empire: remember that, before deciding to sell the company, Logan had highlighted Kendall’s name as his successor.
And, what a coincidence, of his oldest children, the youngest is James, who is considered in the business world to be the most corrosive and unprincipled of the heirs likely to succeed him. He demonstrated this by becoming the visible face of the phone hacking scandal in the United Kingdom in 2011. I mean… Roman?
