Richard Reeves: “I Missed My Chance to Pee on Rupert Murdoch”
“NEW YORK—I first met Rupert Murdoch at the urinal in the men’s room. It was 1976 in an office building somewhere in Manhattan. We were both about to go into a meeting about the fate of New York magazine, then a wild sort of publication staffed with street people—the people put on the street by the folding of the New York Herald Tribune.
” The meeting was at a long table of directors, lawyers, financial people and a couple of old Trib scribblers like me. It was quickly apparent that the fix was in, that Murdoch had already won over a majority of the money people on the board, and he was going to leave the room the owner of the magazine we had made. Like many of us—Ken Auletta, Gail Sheehy, Pete Hamill, Gloria Steinem, Steve Brill, I can’t remember them all—I quit on the spot. We all knew we could not work for this man.”
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