Conservative media tycoon Rupert Murdoch will tie the knot for the fifth time, at the age of 92 years, he said Monday in an interview with his own newspaper, the New York Post. Murdoch is engaged to Ann Lesley Smith, a 66-year-old former police chaplain in San Francisco and widow of American country singer and media executive Chester Smith.
“I was very nervous. I dreaded falling in love — but I knew this would be my last. It better be," he told the tabloid. “I’m happy." Murdoch divorced his fourth wife, model Jerry Hall, last year after six years of marriage.
The Australian Murdoch, whose media empire includes The Wall Street Journal, Fox News and other influential outlets, is worth more than $20 billion, according to Forbes.
Murdoch met his new fiancee last year at an event he hosted at his vineyard in California and soon enough the pair decided to spend “the second half of our lives together," the tycoon was quoted as saying.
In perspective, it’s not my first rodeo. Getting near 70 means being in the last half," said Smith. “I waited for the right time. Friends are happy for me."
The wedding will take place this summer and the couple plans to split their time between the United States and Britain.
Amid the development, let’s take a look at Murdoch’s romantic life and his multiple partners:
First Wife - Patricia Booker
Murdoch, who has six children, was first married to Patricia Booker, an Australian flight attendant, whom he divorced in the late 1960s.
He met Patricia Booker when he was only 25 years old, in 1956. Murdoch’s eldest kid, Prudence, was born two years later to Booker. Vanity Fair in its report described Booker ‘as a gorgeous blonde, former department-store model and airline hostess’. It further said that Murdoch’s mother, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, apparently thought Booker was “less than" she should have been; the two were married for 11 years before divorcing.
Second Wife - Anna Torv
He and his second wife, Anna, a newspaper reporter, were together more than 30 years before divorcing in 1999.
Murdoch married Glasgow-born former newspaper journalist Anna Torv a year later after his divorce from Booker. They’re thought to have met when Torv was working for Murdoch’s Sydney newspaper, the Daily Mirror, and had the chance to interview him, as per a Guardian report. After 32 years of marriage, the media mogul divorced Torv in 1999. Elisabeth, Lachlan, and James are their three children.
Torv previously described her husband as a “very good and moral human being" whose ownership of the Sun newspaper was sometimes misinterpreted. She served on the board of directors of News Corporation from 1990 until the two companies split apart.
“I began to think the Rupert Murdoch that I loved died a long time ago. Perhaps I was in love with the idea of still being in love with him. But the Rupert I fell in love with could not have behaved this way,” she told the Australian Women’s Weekly in a 2001 interview on their separation.
Third Wife - Wendi Deng
Murdoch, was married to his third wife, Chinese-born entrepreneur Wendi Deng for 14 years. They met at a corporate party in Hong Kong in 1997, when Deng, who was more than 30 years his junior, was interning at a News Corp-owned TV station.
Two years later, the pair married in New York Harbour on Murdoch’s garland-bedecked yacht, the Morning Glory, the Guardian reports. They divorced in 2014, and had two daughters, Grace and Chloe.
Murdoch cited irreversible collapse in the marriage as the cause for the divorce, which lasted more than six months. Deng, who was born in China and educated at Yale, was credited for giving her partner a makeover by introducing him to a younger, more tech-savvy group of pals that included Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.
His third marriage ended in 2013.
Fourth Wife - Jerry Hall
Murdoch married Jerry Hall at St Bride’s Church in London in 2016, after meeting a year before.
The event took place a week before Murdoch’s 85th birthday, and visitors included Bob Geldof, Sir Michael Caine, and Rebekah Brooks, CEO of Murdoch’s newspaper stable News UK.
It followed a five-month engagement with the former supermodel, who had previously dated Rolling Stones singer Sir Mick Jagger for over 20 years, says the Guardian report.
The grown Murdoch children truly liked Jerry and supported the marriage, which was in stark contrast to his marriage to Wendi Deng, according to a CNN report. “The London wedding was a joyous family occasion that provided a rare moment of unity among the Murdoch family," the report says. It was reported in August 2022, six years after they married, that Hall and Murdoch had formalised their divorce.
Murdoch’s Empire
Valued at $17.2 billion (real time worth) by a Forbes report, Murdoch owns the cable channel Fox News, as well as The Times of London and The Wall Street Journal. Murdoch sold the majority of Fox’s film studio, FX, and National Geographic Networks, as well as its share in Star India, to Disney in March 2019 for $71.3 billion. Murdoch is the 31st richest person in America and the 71st richest person in the world.
Lachlan Murdoch, Murdoch’s son, is in charge of the new Fox, which includes broadcast, cable news, business, and sports networks. Despite the fact that several of his enterprises have a conservative bent, he first encouraged Mike Bloomberg to run for president against Donald Trump. An Australian native, acquired a newspaper at the age of 22 after his father, a former war journalist, died.
Potential Heirs
Lachlan Murdoch - ‘The First Among Equals’
Rupert Murdoch’s oldest son with his second wife, Anna, is Lachlan Murdoch, aged 51. With internships at his father’s media enterprises, he began learning the family business at a young age. He quickly progressed through the corporate ranks, eventually becoming chairman and CEO of News Limited in 1997, says a report by CNN Business. Lachlan was characterised as “the first among equals" by his father at the time. His ascension was easy until 2005. After a disagreement with Ailes over the direction of the cable news network that year, Lachlan abruptly resigned from his executive roles at News Corporation, thereby putting himself off the heir apparent track. Lachlan then established his own investment firm in Australia, Illyria Pty.
Lachlan returned to the family firm in 2014, after an extended sabbatical, and resumed his role as a prospective heir to the empire, becoming CEO of Fox Television and executive chairman of 21st Century Fox, the report says. Shortly after, Lachlan’s younger brother James was appointed CEO of 21st Century Fox in a power-sharing experiment arranged by Rupert. The venture was a flop, and Rupert sold 21st Century Fox to Disney in 2019. Lachlan is now the executive chairman and CEO of Fox Corporation, as well as the co-chairman of News Corporation and the executive chairman of NOVA Entertainment, an Australian media firm.
James Murdoch - ‘The Rebellious Scion’
A New York Times report describes James Murdoch as the ‘rebellious scion’ of the Murdoch family. He was born in England but raised in New York, followed a business career after dropping out of Harvard University in 1995, as per a Variety 500 report. Rawkus Entertainment, a hip-hop record label he co-founded, was subsequently absorbed into the family empire. Murdoch worked for News Corporation in a variety of positions focusing on digital enterprises from 1996 to 2000. He was then assigned to oversee Star TV’s operations in India and other Asian markets. In 2003, his success with Star won him a promotion to the helm of British Sky Broadcasting (now Sky).
From then, he rose up the corporate ranks, finally overseeing all of Europe, Asia, and international. In 2011, his rise to the top appeared to be derailed when evidence emerged that reporters for Murdoch-owned newspapers in the United Kingdom had engaged in phone hacking of celebrities and other newsmakers. Rupert Murdoch and James Murdoch were obliged to testify before Parliament twice about what they knew about the paper’s actions, and James Murdoch was forced to retire as head of News International’s publishing section, CNN reported.
He returned to the family business after a gap of several years, eventually becoming chairman of Sky and CEO of 21st Century Fox, co-leading the company with older brother Lachlan, who acted as executive chairman. The dual leadership arrangement failed, as James departed 21st Century Fox in 2019 when the firm was sold to Disney, and later left Sky when Comcast acquired majority control. James Murdoch, long known as the Murdoch clan’s lone liberal, resigned from News Corp’s board of directors in 2020, noting at the time, “My resignation is due to disputes about certain editorial content produced by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions."
Elisabeth Murdoch
Elisabeth Murdoch was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1968, and is the first of Rupert Murdoch’s three children with his second wife, Anna Murdoch Mann. Murdoch relocated to Manhattan when she was six years old, when her father took over the New York Post. She went to the Upper East Side’s elite all-girls Brearly School. Elkin Pianim, her first husband, met her at Vassar College, where she was studying.
She began her career at a small Fox station in Utah before moving on to her father’s cable TV company, FX, shortly after graduating from college. She bought two northern California television stations, KSBW in Salinas and KSBY in San Luis Obispo, at the age of 26 and with only a few years of TV management experience. She co-managed the stations with her ex-husband. Its management style appears to have left an impression on the local stations, resulting in considerable personnel turnover. Yet, Murdoch sold the two stations for a $12 million profit after only one year of ownership. Rupert Murdoch appointed his daughter as general manager of broadcasting at BSkyB in London at the age of 27, according to a report by Business Insider.
She opted to leave the family business and forge her own career in 2000. The next year, she established the production business Shine Group. Murdoch married her second husband, Matthew Freud, a public relations executive and the great-grandson of Sigmund Freud, in 2001. Murdoch has two children from her first marriage to Elkin Pianim and two children from her second marriage to Matthew Freud. Murdoch and Freud finally divorced in 2014. Murdoch returned to the family business after an 11-year absence when her father’s company, News Corp, purchased Shine for $663 million.
After News Corporation purchased Shine in 2011, Elisabeth attempted to join the News Corporation board, but the phone hacking incident prohibited her from doing so. She departed Shine following the merging of two other production businesses. Sister, her new production firm, was founded in 2019, and in 2021, Sister supported the opening of a London branch of Ghetto Film School, a non-profit programme that introduces young people of colour to the entertainment industry. She publicly stepped out of the contest against her siblings to inherit her father’s media company in 2012. “I genuinely have no ambition for the top job," she stated that year at the Edinburgh International Television Festival.
With inputs from agencies
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