Don’t tell the writers of Succession, but eternal romantic Rupert Murdoch, 93 on Monday, is finally marrying a lady his children really like!
IN THE rolling hills of Bel Air, up a winding road bordered by gated McMansions, lies the Moraga Estate, a 16-acre property that is home to the only working vineyard in Los Angeles.
Built by Victor Fleming, the legendary director of Gone With The Wind and The Wizard Of Oz, the sun-dappled ranch is, to quote one wine writer who recently embarked on a guided tour, possessed of ‘beauty that grips [visitors] with a kind of escapist romance’.
A similar sense of ‘romance,’ the wine writer somewhat mischievously continued, will from time to time take hold of Moraga’s owner. He is Rupert Murdoch, the 92-year-old patriarch of the world’s most powerful media dynasty who, despite the passage of time, continually seems to find himself on the receiving end of Cupid’s fateful arrow.
In 2022, Murdoch met a 66-year- old widow named Ann Lesley Smith at a 200-person wine tasting on his vineyard’s terrace. One thing led to another and, for a couple of weeks, the sprightly couple were even engaged. But then Murdoch got cold feet and abruptly called things off.
More recently, the Spanish-style property, which boasts views of the Pacific, has been the backdrop to a second storybook love affair. This one has seen the Press baron fall hook, line and sinker for a sprightly 67-year- old Russian-born microbiologist named Elena Zhukova.
ON THURSDAY, the happy couple announced their engagement. An intimate wedding ceremony, at which Ms Zhukova will become the fifth Mrs Murdoch, is now to be held at Moraga on the afternoon of Saturday, June 1. ‘Rupert will be 93 on Monday, so he wants to get on with it,’ was how a source close to the tycoon explained the whirlwind development.
‘It will be a small, low-key wedding at a place Rupert is very fond of. Elena also lives in Los Angeles, so it feels right for her, too. She is a beautiful person, inside and out, and a true intellectual, who worked for many years as a research professor. They talk a lot, and share a real curiosity about the world.’
Said another family acquaintance: ‘Rupert is very happy. She’s a genuinely lovely and smart person, he’s the archetypal old man in a hurry, and no one knows what the future holds. So I think they’ve basically come to the conclusion there’s no point hanging around.’
Invitations to the big day have already been sent out. Guests, who are expected to include Rupert’s six and Elena’s three children, are likely to be served beef from Murdoch’s 340,000-acre ranch in Montana, along with the ‘remarkably refined wines’ (to quote Moraga’s website) harvested from the surrounding hillside, which retail for between $75 and $140 (£58-£110) per bottle.
Comparisons will, inevitably, be drawn with Succession, the hit TV drama that was largely inspired by the occasionally fractious Murdoch clan.
But insiders describe the family as being ‘intensely relaxed’ about the impending nuptials. ‘For the first time in an awfully long time, the kids actually like his choice of bride,’ I’m told. ‘ Particularly Lachlan [the eldest son], who got to know Elena pretty well last summer, shortly after [she and Rupert] got together, when they spent time yachting around the Med with his family.’
The Murdoch clan also have little to fear in terms of how the development will affect their business interests. ‘There’s no chance of the marriage producing a child, the financial side of things are basically sewn up, and the question of who will inherit everything was finally sorted out back in September,’ adds the source. Back then, Rupert handed over the reins of the empire, which is valued at around $ 17 billion (£13billion), to Lachlan, the first son of his second wife, Anna.
Rupert then moved to an ‘Emeritus Chairman’ role. His businesses, which include a global stable of newspapers, including Britain’s Times and Sun, along with a broadcasting arm with assets such as Fox news, are now controlled by a family trust.
The structure is designed so that, in the event of Murdoch’s death, equal shares will be held by each of his four eldest children.
In addition to Lachlan, they are Prudence, daughter of first wife Patricia Booker, and Elisabeth and James, product of his 30-year marriage to Scottish-born Anna.
Elena’s pedigree is similarly complex, not to mention glamorous. In fact, Tatler once dubbed her ‘Rupert Murdoch’s ultimate power match’ thanks to her position at the heart of an influential nexus encompassing the art world, Russian oligarchs and a famous Greek shipping dynasty.
She was born in Moscow to Jewish parents and originally came to the u.S. in 1991, after being offered a post at Baylor university in Texas during the Russian ‘brain drain’ that followed the fall of Communism. Her specialism was research into diabetes.
Elena brought her daughter, dasha, with her. The girl’s father Alexander Zhukov — Elena’s exhusband — remained behind in
the former USSR. Shortly after arriving, Elena had a boy and another girl, Yuri and Katya, via a short-lived relationship with an American named George Gause and, in 1994, moved to Los Angeles to take up a research job at UCLA, the city’s most famous university.
Back in Russia, Alexander was making a fortune investing in energy. He moved to London, achieved billionaire status, and was able to help support Dasha’s education at an exclusive private school on the west side of LA.
Elena’s life changed once more in the mid-2000s, when 24-yearold Dasha, who had joined her father in the UK, was introduced to Roman Abramovich, then 40, on the so-called ‘Chel-ski’ circuit.
They quickly struck up a relationship and married in 2008, following the oligarch’s divorce from his second wife. Shortly after marrying Abramovich, Dasha gave her mother a new home in Beverly Hills, worth around £7 million.
A former UCLA colleague said: ‘ Elena already came from a wealthy background, then her daughter married.’ She subsequently retired from UCLA.
Dasha, who had a son with Abramovich, remained married to the Russian until 2018. She is now the wife of shipping heir Stavros Niarchos, a former boyfriend of socialite Paris Hilton, with whom she has a second son. On the professional front, she is also a well- established philanthropist and patron of the arts.
It was in the latter capacity that Dasha became friendly with Wendi Deng, Murdoch’s Chinese-born third wife (with whom he has two daughters), whom the media mogul divorced in 2013 (amid rumours, vigorously denied, that she had developed an infatuation with Tony Blair).
LAST summer, Wendi, who is also active on the arts scene, hosted a large gathering at her home in Los Angeles to which both Dasha and her mother were invited. This is reported to have been the event at which Rupert was first introduced to Elena.
Murdoch subsequently invited her to spend time with him on a summer cruise.
They were first spotted together in the Med aboard the Christina O, the legendary superyacht on which Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis famously seduced JFK’s widow Jackie Kennedy, which costs around $760,000 (£590,000) per week to charter.
Since then, Rupert and Elena have spent the lion’s share of their time together in Los Angeles. Friends regard her as an improvement on Ann Lesley Smith, the retired dental hygienist and wife of late country music singer Chester Smith, to whom Rupert was briefly engaged last March.
When news of that betrothal became public, Murdoch declared: ‘I dreaded falling in love, but I knew this would be my last. It better be. I’m happy.’
Ann Lesley, for her part, admitted ‘it’s not my first rodeo’. But things disintegrated soon afterwards, allegedly because Rupert became uncomfortable with her evangelical views.
Sources said they’d argued, among other things, over Smith’s belief that the Covid pandemic was part of a global conspiracy cooked up deliberately by Bill Gates. On another occasion, reporters were told: ‘She said Tucker Carlson [the former Fox News host] is a messenger from God, and he said nope.’
Their subsequent break-up was, however, distinctly less messy than Murdoch’s 2022 split from Jerry Hall, the model, actress and ex-wife of Rolling Stone Mick Jagger, whom he had married in London in 2016, a week before his 85th birthday, surrounded by their children.
That one was ended via an email which eventually ended up in the hands of Vanity Fair magazine.
‘Jerry, sadly I’ve decided to call an end to our marriage. We have certainly had some good times, but I have much to do,’ wrote Rupert. ‘My New York lawyer will be contacting yours immediately.’
Ms Hall later told friends she was given a mere 30 days to vacate Moraga, where they had sat out the pandemic together, and was required to pack up her belongings under the gaze of security guards, showing receipts to prove what she took was hers.
Under the terms of their divorce settlement, Hall was also allegedly forbidden from giving story ideas to Succession writers.
Then, when she had moved into their Oxfordshire home that she received in the divorce, she allegedly discovered surveillance cameras that were still sending footage back to Fox headquarters. It was reported that Mick Jagger had sent his security consultant to disconnect them. By way of revenge, sources sympathetic to Hall then briefed Vanity Fair about their six-year marriage, portraying her role as part-wife, part-carer.
‘In recent years, Murdoch has suffered a broken back, seizures, two bouts of pneumonia, atrial fibrillation and a torn Achilles tendon, a source close to the mogul told me,’ the magazine reported. ‘Many of these episodes went unreported in the Press, which was just how Murdoch liked it.’
EXAMPLES included a 2018 incident when the couple were sailing in the Caribbean aboard the Sarissa, a 140ft yacht owned by Lachlan. Murdoch suffered a serious fall and was found ‘in excruciating pain on the cabin floor’. He was flown to Los Angeles and diagnosed with arrhythmia and a broken back, Vanity Fair claimed.
No sooner had Hall nursed him back to health than he tripped over a box of chess pieces given to him for his 87th birthday and tore his Achilles tendon.
A further scare came when he ‘nearly collapsed’ at the Cotswold wedding of his 21-year-old granddaughter Charlotte Freud, following a case of Covid which had seen him hospitalised in London. At the wedding, where guests were dressed in theatrical attire, Murdoch, in a white suit and red suede shoes, was supported by Lachlan.
Given the ructions those breakups have caused, one could be forgiven for wondering why the media mogul continues to pursue marital bliss.
Some reckon it’s partly due to his old-fashioned morality (‘ he doesn’t really believe in sex outside marriage’), while others believe it’s a product of the inherent restlessness that has seen him turn a small family newspaper into a global media empire, when lesser mortals might have retired to spend more time with their art collections and private jets.
‘There’s a psychological element to it all,’ adds one seasoned media observer. ‘He seems incapable of having a relationship with a woman without wanting to marry her. Whether it’s fuelled by loneliness, or fear, or something deeper, who knows?’
It remains to be seen whether the next Murdoch wedding will be a case of fifth time lucky. But the Moraga Estate’s 92- year- old groom is certainly hoping for a Hollywood ending.