This is what Messier was trying to do in America—and this was his fatal error. He thought that in America he could enter into a realm of Euro-ish we-all-understand-each-other-and-we-all-get-rich-together. That the mogul class, which he thought he was joining, was such a rich-get-richer realm.
And so he got close to Barry Diller, assuming that there was a great, even historic, alliance being formed here.
It’s almost painful to recount the details of what happened. Diller had already taken the Bronfmans, when, in an effort to “play” with Barry, Edgar Jr. had sold Barry an undervalued position in the Universal television holdings. While this deal exposed the Bronfmans to great ridicule, the connection to Diller probably held great attraction for Messier. By getting Universal, he got Barry. I’ll bet Messier’s fantasy was to turn Diller into his consigliere, his Zen master even. And such a relationship—perhaps he even thought he was hiring Barry, that Barry would become something of a French civil servant—would put him in some front rank of mogul masters. Together, Jean-Marie and Barry would be a new axis.
In fact, suddenly, in a kind of ultimate conquest, an annexation even, Jean-Marie seemed even to buy Barry. The same television properties that Universal had sold to Barry at a steep discount, it now bought back from Barry (plus much more) at a great premium.
And, briefly, many people saw this as a Messier triumph. He was lovingly attended in Vanity Fair. The deal was part of his strange, public, and ultimately embarrassing metamorphosis, or supposed metamorphosis, from French bureaucrat into major world leader. There were other deals, more publicity, more speeches.
There are two points here:
You, the mogul, might naturally come to believe, because of all the machinations and alliances and dramatic as well as subtle shifts of power, that you are involved in a process of geopolitical moves, even that you are engaged in an historical process of taking over the world (God knows, Messier had the French briefly believing they meant something again in the global community).
But the other point is that with everything getting so very heady and estimable, it’s very easy to forget that you’re a con man too—that being a con man is what keeps you alive, that if you don’t keep getting the better of someone, that probably means they’re getting the better of you. It’s easy to forget that your great historical significance depends on your workaday opportunism.
Deals are complex things: You get conned (sometimes you have to even let yourself be conned in order to do a deal) and then you have to con someone else. You have to keep the balance (and balance sheet) right—that is, you have to con more than you get conned.
Messier, in a way that you can almost bring yourself to admire (there is a certain innocence to it, at any rate), got swept up in his historic, world-beating, grandiose role—and kept letting himself be conned, without conning anyone.
Now Messier became not an exception, but a kind of example of the inexorable forces that work on all moguls—the need to be bigger and bigger, to grow beyond proportion, to be transformed.
I live On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, on the margins of the neighborhood where the great moguls live. You’ve got Barry Diller and the former Mrs. Sumner Redstone (Mrs. Redstone threw out Mr. Redstone) at the Carlyle Hotel (and Mr. Redstone nearby). You’ve got Mort Zuckerman on Fifth Avenue. You’ve got Michael Bloomberg on East 79th Street. You’ve got Sean “P. Diddy” Combs on Park and 75th Street. You’ve had Edgar Bronfman Jr. in the East Sixties (he recently sold this home). Michael Eisner grew up just a few blocks away. And Rupert Murdoch always kept a place here before moving to a younger neighborhood with his newer and younger wife (I used to see Murdoch jogging around the reservoir in Central Park; I’d follow steps behind him—a small man in a too-dapper running suit—thinking how fragile he looked and how powerful he was and how easy it would be to snatch him away). And, of course, all around the East Side you’ve got the bankers and lawyers who do the media deals.
Then—and you know how the realtor must have sold him the property, telling him all about Barry and Sumner and Edgar and P. Diddy—we got Jean-Marie Messier, who moved into a $17.5 million Park Avenue apartment that the company paid for (even on Park Avenue, $17.5 million is a lot of dough for an apartment).
At the height of Messier’s reign, I was walking on Madison Avenue in my mogul neighborhood with my son Steven, who was shopping for an ice-cream cone, when we saw a figure who prompted Steven to exclaim, “Look at that guy!”
There was, languorously moving up Madison Avenue, a small man, with a coat cast capelike over his shoulders and the most pleased-with-himself expression I have ever seen on an adult, whom I recognized, after the slightest moment of surprise, to be Jean-Marie himself (I quite doubt anyone else recognized him). He occupied a wide swath of the sidewalk, with a strut to the left and then a strut to the right, nodding and smiling, or rather bestowing blessings, on passersby, who gave him wide and incredulous berth. He seemed to see himself as some combination of Pope and maestro—his idea, I suppose, of an American mogul. (Not something, of course, you could see yourself as, if what you are is a CEO of a water and sewer company.) I do not think he would have considered spontaneous applause to be out of order.
I would have thought that this was it. I could even make the argument that Messier is the final flowering of the mogul. That, with the arrival of Messier and Vivendi—the overnight international media conglomerate—it suddenly became clear to everyone that the jig was up. That the long joke had reached its anticlimactic punch line.
But if the media puts a vast premium on association, it also has a special talent, and keen appreciation, for disassociation.
He is not one of us. That was only his delusion—his overreach.
What’s more, one mogul’s failure is another’s success.
The market is speaking.
And then, in a complex social realm—Edith Wharton’s New York updated—there have to be morality plays. You cannot have an inner circle of the influential and powerful if people are not regularly, and dramatically, expelled from it.
After Messier Was fired, Thomas Middelhoff, the über manager’s manager at Bertelsmann, bought the farm; then Bob Pittman, the COO at AOL Time Warner, got the shiv only months after AOL Time Warner CEO Jerry Levin’s sacking. In the summer of 2002, three of the six largest media companies, almost in tandem, dismissed their CEOs and top managers. When any big company throws out its management, you know something pretty extreme is going on—it’s akin to a coup in a mostly stable nation. But when half (to date) of the leading companies of one of the nation’s leading industries all at once begin firing their leaders, it’s destabilization on a continental scale.
And too, in the summer of 2002, it seemed increasingly possible that Martha Stewart, that symbol of media wholesomeness and ubiquity, was going to go to jail.
This was all, of course, against the