Rupert Murdoch has made it into my blog because he is one of the strongest believers in the institution of marriage that I know (See my previous entry on Murdoch marriage adventures. Not long after his divorce from Mick Jagger’s old flame Jerry Hall, he got himself a new wife at age 92.  Here are the details which he shared with one of the newspapers he owns and then a report from the NY Times.

Rupert Murdoch engaged to Ann Lesley Smith

By Cindy Adams NY Post

Rupert Murdoch. Professionally, the parent of Earth’s media. Personally, the creator of new news himself. Celebrating March, his Nativity month, a new scoop is Mr. Murdoch’s getting married — again.

But first, before anything, we discuss the important stuff. Like his bride-to-be’s Asscher-cut diamond solitaire which the almost groom personally selected. He says: “I’m one-fourth Irish.” He presented the ring to her on St. Pat’s Day in our very own NYC.

He says: “I was very nervous. I dreaded falling in love — but I knew this would be my last. It better be. I’m happy.”

Former San Fran police chaplain Ann Lesley Smith, 66, whose late husband was Chester Smith, the country singer, radio and TV exec: “For us both it’s a gift from God. We met last September.

“I’m a widow 14 years. Like Rupert, my husband was a businessman. Worked for local papers, developed radio and TV stations and helped promote Univision. So I speak Rupert’s language. We share the same beliefs.

“In perspective, it’s not my first rodeo. Getting near 70 means being in the last half. I waited for the right time. Friends are happy for me.”

Rupert on meeting at his vineyard Moraga in Bel Air, Calif.: “She and her husband also owned a vineyard and had been in the wine business. Last year when there was 200 people at my vineyard, I met her and we talked a bit. Two weeks later I called her.”

Steeped in wisdom I said: OK. But today it’s all about couples just living together. No ceremony. That’s the new trend. In Hollywood, they even iron out the divorce settlement before rushing ahead with any wedding.

The groom-to-be adds: “We’re both looking forward to spending the second half of our lives together.”

The wedding’s late summer. Besides a personal shopper, friends are scouring shops and designers for Ann’s gown.

They will spend their time between California, the UK, Montana and New York.

Rupert Murdoch appeared so happy that somehow I didn’t think it was the right moment to ask him for a raise.

The Privilege of a New Start

What does it look like to thrive in the second half of one’s life? That may depend on whether you’re a man or a woman.

By Rhonda Garelick NY Times

The Australian media mogul and Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch, 92 (recently divorced from fourth wife, the supermodel Jerry Hall), has announced his engagement to Ann Lesley Smith, 66, whose past careers include police chaplain, model and singer-songwriter.

Even if he admits to “falling in love,” as he told The New York Post, why rush back into marriage, especially considering all the legal and financial complications that surely attend a union in which one party is a nonagenarian billionaire?

A cynical explanation would be that a love story offers an ideal distraction for Mr. Murdoch. It could deflect media attention from the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought against his company Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems, which may go to trial next month.

But there may be another reason Mr. Murdoch would trouble himself to marry again at this stage of life: Because he can.

Getting married is one of life’s big signposts. It brings a sense of adventure and possibilities. Every wedding is a frontier, dividing one’s life into a before and an after. And that creation of a new “after” imbues all weddings, no matter the age of the participants, with an aura of youth.

Mr. Murdoch acknowledged as much himself, telling The New York Post (which he owns), “We’re both looking forward to spending the second half of our lives together.” While an ironic, even witty remark, his words nonetheless contain that sense of futurity, of more life left, that new marriage conjures.

Everyone has a right to pursue such pleasures, but the playing field is hardly level. To become a newlywed at 92, having found a highly accomplished partner 26 years one’s junior, surely counts among the world’s rarest privileges — for which it obviously helps to be a billionaire, and, crucially, a man.

Let’s face it, few women who reach their 90s can expect to find suitors, and certainly not suitors young enough to be their own children. Women of elder years do not circulate easily in the dating and marriage market. (Quick thought exercise, just reverse the couple’s ages and genders here and do a plausibility check: Dianne Feinstein, 89, and Andy Garcia, 66? The late Queen Elizabeth, 96 when she died, and Tom Hanks, 66?)

Humans, especially over 50, yearn to stave off mortality, but our culture encourages men and women to do that in very different ways. Women are often encouraged to practice “anti-aging,” to plump and highlight, tighten and tone ourselves into the closest possible approximation of an eternally 38-year-old woman. This is especially true for women in the public eye: women on television, in films or in the news, and women who marry billionaires.

All too often, remaining a publicly viable woman in the second half of life means — paradoxically — doing one’s utmost to look like one is still in the first half of life. Being visible as a woman, that is, requires making one’s age invisible. It’s a conflictual, not to say crazy-making diktat, to follow.

With her smooth skin, flowing auburn hair and gleaming smile, Ms. Smith (Mr. Murdoch’s fiancée) looks considerably younger than her years. Recent photos show her tan and fit in a yellow bikini while relaxing on a beach and frolicking in the surf with a swimsuit-clad Mr. Murdoch.

Physical signs of aging, even of extreme age, do not carry much stigma for men. Instead, men like Mr. Murdoch resist old age — and permit themselves (even if jokingly) to speak of entering, at 92, the “second half” of their lives — by focusing outward, through the agency of other people, acquiring younger (and “anti-aged”) companions to inspire or energize them.

This week, just as those photos of Mr. Murdoch and Ms. Smith appeared, a former Fox employee filed a lawsuit against the company in New York’s Southern District. In her suit, Abby Grossberg, a booker for “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” alleges that she was “subjected to vile sexist stereotypes,” and “overworked, undervalued” and “denied opportunities for promotion” because she was a woman.

According to Ms. Grossberg, considerable ageism accompanied the sexism she encountered. She claims, for example, that a senior male colleague referred to the Fox anchor Maria Bartiromo, 55, as “menopausal” and “hysterical.” Ms. Grossberg also described the walls of Tucker Carlson’s office as plastered with “large images of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a plunging bathing suit revealing her cleavage.”

Displaying those photos of Ms. Pelosi, who is over 80, was meant to strip her of her power, to demean and belittle one of the most powerful women in the world. On the other hand, press photos of the (far older) Mr. Murdoch in a swimsuit, girlfriend by his side, are presumed to accomplish the opposite, drawing attention to his power and virility, his ability to attract yet another much-younger spouse.

What does such a dichotomy do to us all? How are we affected by the continual stream of media messages that celebrate men’s power and vitality throughout their lives — wrinkles, baldness and sagging be damned — while encouraging women to erase or disguise every last possible sign of age in order to remain in the public arena?

Vanity is a natural part of the human condition and there’s no moral crime in looking one’s best, however we accomplish this. But age catches up with us all, and in the end, isn’t this implicit erasure of women’s “second halves” a form of lying, a subtle pressure on women themselves to lie? To tamp themselves down? To agonize over their age?

And is it just possible that a culture accustomed to such constant dissembling of aging and mortality in women grows inured also to accepting other habitual forms of dissembling: broader falsehoods, tiny to consequential, about those in power and those who have none? What changes might ensue if we granted all women a fully visible, ocean-wadingly free, second half?

Surpise: Murdoch’s engagement is called offt

This time Murdoch did not even make it to the alter and another divorce was not necessary

The engagement of the billionaire media titan and Ann Lesley Smith was reported to be off after just two weeks
Edward Helmore in New York Sat 8 Apr 2023 08.30 BST

Rupert Murdoch’s summer wedding to Ann Lesley Smith was called off last week, barely two weeks after it had been announced, upon the arrival of spring, in the pages of the New York Post. “We’re both looking forward to spending the second half of our lives together,” Murdoch, 92, said of the union, three days after he’d put a $2m Asscher-cut diamond solitaire engagement ring on Smith’s wedding finger during St Patrick’s Day festivities in New York.

Smith, 66, a former San Francisco police chaplain whose late husband was the country singer Chester Smith (who was also a television executive), told the Post that the union “a gift from God”.

But scarcely two weeks later, Vanity Fair revealed a source close to the media titan told the publication the billionaire had become “increasingly uncomfortable” with Smith’s “outspoken evangelical views” and the wedding was off. A spokesman for Murdoch acknowledged to the New York Times that it would not be a “great leap” to say that the relationship was over.

Smith had raised some eyebrows with how strongly she expressed her religious views at a party in Barbados that she and Murdoch attended over Christmas, a source familiar with the Murdoch social scene told the Guardian.

Smith, who had also once been married to Michael Carabello, percussionist in the acid psychedelic rock band Santana, has spoken publicly in the past about the powerful way that religion changed her life. “The Lord gave me thirst and a hunger for Him, and I actually replaced the things of the world with the Scriptures,” she told the Christian Broadcasting Network in 2013. “As I began to walk with God, the things of the world just seemed pointless to me.”

The would-be Murdoch bride may also have been uncomfortable with the recent media attention – including reports of a dispute Smith had with three stepchildren from a previous marriage over a trust. A court found it “lost all confidence in her ability to administer the trust other than for her own benefit”. The dispute was settled in 2010, and Smith admitted no wrongdoing.

But does this fully explain the abrupt change of direction for the couple? Murdoch watchers, often barely divisible from fans of the fictionalized, high-end HBO drama Succession, speculated that the cold feet may also have been influenced to some extent by the heirs – James, Elisabeth, Lachlan and Prudence – with votes in the trust that will some day determine who runs the company. “Whenever you have a patriarch, a family legacy and money, there’s going to be a power struggle. It’s surprising how much the children are in thrall to him and how much they don’t want to share him,” said one person familiar with the family dynamics.

Murdoch’s fourth wife, Jerry Hall, found that, while she was at first welcomed into the fold, she was later iced her out when she enforced a strict pandemic lockdown around her 89-year-old husband at their country home in England. Hall later got an email reportedly informing her the marriage was over.

Lachlan and James reportedly tried to talk their father out of marrying Wendi Deng in 1999. A divorce in 2013 was accompanied by a dispute over whether their two children, Grace and Chloe, would receive voting rights. Deng’s exit from the family was also accompanied by an unfriendly article in the Wall Street Journal, another Murdoch title.

The latest drama, too, arguably has hallmarks of an effort to ringfence the four-times wed patriarch.

One person with connections to the family said they detected the hand of the four central offspring in Smith’s exit. “Her devout religious views may have been the thorn that drew blood,” they said, adding that some resistance may have come from Elizabeth, 54, and Prudence, 65, rather than James, 50, or Lachlan, 51.

Murdoch and Smith met last September at his Moraga Vineyard in Bel Air, California (Smith, too, had owned a vineyard 300 miles north in Escalon). Others contend they met at Murdoch’s Montana ranch a year before his split from Hall last summer, when the former dental hygienist was said to have offered to check his cavities, claims one Manhattan friend of Hall.

Murdoch of course also has other stresses in his life, including an imminent defamation trial against Fox News in Delaware. Dominion Voting Systems, a company that produces voting machines and tabulators, claims Murdoch’s Fox News and Fox Corporation knowingly spread false information about the 2020 US elections or did so with reckless disregard for the truth. Fox has said the case “is and always has been about the first amendment protections of the media’s absolute right to cover the news”.

Last week, a judge ruled that the case was robust enough to conclude that Fox hosts and guests had repeatedly made false claims about Dominion’s machines and their supposed role in a fictional plot to steal the election. Judge Eric Davis rejected arguments that Murdoch’s age and location, “far-removed from the events in dispute” while under Covid-19 lockdown in England, should absolve him from testifying in person – if attorneys for Dominion subpoena him.

Davis said he had heard Murdoch, chairman of Fox Corporation, publicly discussed his plans to travel with Smith ( the couple said they’d spend their time between California, the UK, Montana and New York). “That doesn’t sound like someone who can’t go from New York to Wilmington,” he said.

Unless it’s settled, jurors will be asked to decide if Fox News’s false claims were made despite the network knowing they were untrue, and to assess damages that could run as high as $1.6bn. Fox News, as a cable news outlet, cannot be stripped of a FCC broadcast license but could have to fend off shareholder complaints.

“If Fox’s reputation is damaged such that it loses money, management is going to be accountable to shareholders,” said the corporate governance expert Charles Elson. “But the difference between news and opinion is so clouded, it’s questionable how much damage a trial can do.”

David Folkenflik, author of Murdoch’s World: The Last of the Old Media Empires, reckons the reports of marital litigation from a previous relationship that have emerged about his ex-fiancee “would be troubling for any media magnate seeking a relatively smooth family control of his public companies and probably even more troubling for his adult children”.

Perhaps, though, the union just did not seem like a good mix. “Murdoch likes to have companionship, and who can blame him?” said Folkenflik. If this was the drama Succession, he added, “this would seem like a character with attributes you wouldn’t want inside the tent no matter how charming she might be.”

Source: The Guardian