Dear Tucker,
I sensed in your reply to David Franklin the exasperation of one who has had his own share of mail from strangers who have made instantaneous and severe judgments of his character after watching him on television. I almost never go on television for the simple reason that I think very slowly (and also that I look like a deer caught in the headlights). And when I do, I am reminded of all the reasons not to. I just finished reading the mail that got sent to the Post after I was on Brian Lamb’s C-SPAN show. (I love this show. You get up at 6 a.m. to wash your hair in time to get downtown by 7:45, and then when you get there, Brian Lamb asks you on live TV what you thought of this morning’s lead story in the Kansas City Star. As if!) Anyway, the mail was mostly about how the [fill in ugly epithets for gays and lesbians here] have taken over the Democratic Party and if I had a single molecule of honesty in my pathetic being I would be pointing this out. No undecided voters in the mailbag.
Anyway, I need to know the size of the pot that Franklin decided to preserve before I can mediate this dispute. I’m mostly just relieved that the woman bet big.
Let’s make a pact not to go anywhere near politics today. (I almost went back to bed when I found the Times’ nth dispatch from Lansing: “Such is life in a tossup city in a swing district in a battleground state.” But my husband and I had to meet with an architect so he could laugh at the idea of finishing our basement by the beginning of next summer. He told us that we would have to wait four months even to see his face again, never mind the contractor’s.)
The must-read story in this morning’s news is the Wall Street Journal’s long, dishy lede treatment of Rupert Murdoch’s mysterious wife, 31-year-old Wendi Deng Murdoch. It’s the kind of story that makes the Journal’s front page such an occasional feast. The nominal, business-y excuse for the story (strangely missing a byline) is that Deng, who was employed by a News Corp. subsidiary when she snagged the 69-year-old chairman, has become a major player in the company’s expansion into the Internet and media industries in China.
But of course the delight is in its account of her rise from birth in China (“A good student and a champion volleyball player. …”) to Yale Business School graduate and femme fatale. We learn about her first marriage to one Mr. Cherry, an American she met when he was working in China. Cherry and his then-wife sponsored her move at 19 to the United States and put her up so she could attend college in California; before long, Deng was Mrs. Cherry–for just long enough, the story suggests, to secure her green card. (Definitely the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt here.) “She told me I was a father concept to her, but it would never be anything else. … I loved that girl,” Cherry obligingly told the Journal.
The best part of all is the way she has transformed Murdoch from a pin-striped denizen of the Upper East Side to a SoHo resident who “suddenly started sporting black turtlenecks on some social occasions” and pumps iron with a trainer at 6 a.m.
(Here’s a fun fact to know and share: When you type “SoHo” on Microsoft Word, your spell-checker offers up “Coho” as an alternative. Isn’t that too, too Seattle of it?)
Apolitically,
Marjorie
