Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media. Michael Wolff
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to fattening a pig.
Jean-Marie Messier was given the pig-fattening mogul treatment.
Certainly there was lavish press attention—the kind that comes not just from Jean-Marie’s own people saying loving things about Jean-Marie, but from everybody talking him up, pumping him greatly.
And wouldn’t this have been a smart idea?
For a period after Messier did his deal for Universal, which would bring him into frequent dealings with Barry Diller, Diller went around telling everybody who would listen how astute Messier was. He’s the real thing, Barry kept saying.
At the same time, let’s just assume that Barry knew Messier was the opposite of the real thing. That he was entirely a made-up creation. A self-actualized creature. A … joke. Let’s assume this not least of all because Diller has made his career on the basis of the best instincts for other people’s weaknesses.
Now, surely, Diller wants to foster goodwill with the new owner of a business he’s in substantial partnership with. But too, let’s consider the advantages of getting your partner to believe he’s vastly more capable and cunning and astute than he really is.
Messier receives the full Vanity Fair treatment—Vanity Fair being a kind of Debrett’s of Hollywood power and royalty—proclaiming him the new mogul.
He is invited everywhere to speak.
He is drawn in. He even begins the process of moving to America, of becoming an American.
I saw him speak at a Variety conference. Messier, who spoke a French person’s idea of good English, went on and on about his vision: convergence, the digital world, handheld devices, transactions, cell-phone movies.
What was this, if not a setup?
If you don’t know who the fool is in a room full of bankers and deal makers and media bigs, it’s you.
There is, further, a belief among deal doers that as a result of language and cultural barriers and compensatory arrogance (with the French, of course, being among the most compensatorily arrogant), foreigners are incapable of doing proper due diligence—that is, making a basic assessment as to the substance of what they are buying, whether the land is underwater or not. Therefore you can sell them anything—especially in the media business, where what you’re buying is such an uncertain affair anyway.
This was true of the Japanese when they bought Hollywood studios, the Germans when they bought book companies, the Dutch and the French and the English (who have their own linguistic—and emotional—issues) when they bought magazines, and the French and the English when they bought ad agencies: They all bought much less than they thought they were buying. (Murdoch, as it happens, is the exception to the foreigners-always-get-brutalized-and-robbed paradigm. But then, he did what most foreigners would never do: He became an American—which, oddly, and comically, and in Murdoch’s image, Jean-Marie Messier tried also, haplessly, to do.)
Foreigners may do okay when they buy factories (although the Germans don’t seem to have done great buying Chrysler), but media really complicates the buy-sell equation.
The cool factor is one of the big complications. You buy media to be cool; and paying attention to details (like leases and contracts and trademarks, and, in general, who owns what, and what moneys are reliably due and what the kettle of fish should actually be worth in a reasonable world) is not cool. Indeed, foreigners to assert their own cool often cultivate a dismissive attitude about the silly American obsession with details (and low-class obsession with money).
This casualness and assumption of superiority on the part of the French allowed the Bronfman family to sell Jean-Marie Messier an illusion as much as a film studio.
“Everybody makes a lot of money when the French come to town,” said the advertising man Jerry Delia Femina when I called him to ask about his experience when the French bought his advertising agency. (The French company that bought his agency became, in the great sweep-up, part of Vivendi too—and then later was spun out.)
It is, though, in all fairness, not just a case of American (or, in the case of the Bronfmans, Canadian) media people taking advantage of foreign media people (indeed, the Japanese took advantage of the Bronfmans).
Hollywood people are surely crooks, and even if they were virtuous, they might not have been able to resist taking money from foreigners who are so guileless and yet so arrogant. (Sometimes foreigners who are ruined in Hollywood are crooks themselves. Let us not forget that Gian Carlo Paretti, who bought MGM, took the French bank Crédit Lyonnais, which financed the deal, for nearly all it was worth and has been on the lam pretty much ever since.) But at the same time, you have to consider the intent of the foreigners: Their desire is to out-Hollywood Hollywood.
The process of becoming a mogul is the assumption of mogul-like powers—you start to believe that you can outhondle any hondlers, that you can take advantage of anybody before they take advantage of you. It’s a straight-up Hollywood syndrome: They’ve seen it done in the movies, so they think they can do it.
And so Euro moguls, in deep cross-cultural celluloid thrall, try to ape (or outape) American moguls.
In some sense, they achieve even more outsize egos and a greater sense of entitlement than their American mogul counterparts because in Europe there is a greater tradition of the one true strutting supremo (together with milder accounting rules and securities oversight).
Everyone’s favorite Euro-media supremo is of course Berlusconi, the Italian in the guise of the very American figure of a smiling, affable salesman. He has managed to monopolize his nation’s media (half of its television, its largest magazine publisher, its leading newsmagazine, a major national newspaper, and the biggest book publishers) as well as its political system.
Indeed, it is this connection between the government and the media, a deeply incestuous relationship in almost every European country, that suggests, not unreasonably, a lot of self-dealing and tends to create a culture of people saying things with the assumption that other people know they are saying something else.
“The French,” in Delia Femina’s analysis, “are simply incapable of telling the truth.”
The Europeans, of course, accuse the Americans of small-time literal-mindedness, hypocritical moralizing, and intellectual dishonesty. Life and business, the Europeans argue, are complex, shaded, many-layered.
As it happens, this live-and-let-live, you-scratch-me-I’ll-scratch-you attitude results in many European countries in a national web of interlocking companies so tight that all companies become one and monopoly is truly complete (or else unnecessary). On the other hand, the Euros would argue that this is exactly what AOL Time Warner is about, so shut up.
Here’s a Euro-media snapshot:
Havas, one of the early pieces of the Vivendi media empire and the largest and oldest publisher in France, collaborated with the Germans during World War II and, as punishment, was nationalized after the war. (So, along with Bertelsmann, that makes two of the most important media companies in the U.S. former Nazi accomplices.) Under the management of the French government, Havas added advertising agencies, bus-tour companies, and pay television to its portfolio.
Under chairman Pierre Dauzier, an associate of French prime minister Jacques Chirac, Havas arrived in the U.S. in the late eighties, when it took a small stake in the English advertising group WCRS, which owned the U.S. agencies Della Femina McNamee and HBM/Creamer. As the English group encountered financing difficulties, the Havas agency, Eurocom, continued to raise its stake, taking over all of the WCRS advertising and public-relations interests by the early nineties.
In 1991, under the firm encouragement of the French government, Eurocom merged with the ailing French advertising group RSCG (“Why should we?” perhaps the conversation went with government authorities. “Why? Because you are French” was perhaps the answer), which owned U.S. agencies Messner, Vetere, Berger, McNamee & Schmetterer and Tatham-Laird.
In 1995, Havas, officially privatized but with the French government still a major