Marlene Wagman-Geller

Nov 20, 2024 by Marlene Wagman-Geller

 

“As for what other people think of me, I could worry about that every day, but choose not to.” –Wendi Deng Murdoch
 

 In 1972, the group Hall and Oates released their song that carried the refrain, “You can rely on the rich man’s money.” The lyric could have applied to Wendi Deng whose “old man” was billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Their relationship could have made copy in the Austrian aristocrat’s tabloid.

 

Wendi Deng, whose legacy bookends a pie and a Prime Minister, was a legend to a group known as the Shanghai girls. Their hope of fleeing their communist country was a wealthy western man who would whisk them away to the land of milk and honey slash money. Wendi surpassed even their wildest dreams.

 

The mistress of reinvention was born Deng Wen Ge: Wenge translates to “cultural revolution.” The name was a common one in the era when it was best for one’s health and welfare to follow the precepts of Mao Tse-Tung’s dictatorship. As a teenager, she changed her name to Deng Wen Di, (Wendi) that translates to “cultural enlightenment.” Wendi grew up in Xuzhou, the polluted factory town of three million. Under the regime’s austerity, the lights went off at seven p.m. until the next morning; hot water, telephones, televisions, and refrigerators were mirages. “Boring” was the adjective Wendi used to describe her childhood; she never owned a doll, never played with a toy. To better her prospects, Wendi awakened at 3:00 a.m. to study English, the language she hoped would provide a passport out of the Bamboo Curtain. Her father, Dehui Deng, a factory manager, and her mother, Xue Qin Lie, an engineer, earned a combined salary of $43.00 a month. Their 500 square foot apartment was home to her parents, two older sisters, younger brother, and elderly aunt whose feet had been bound. New shoes arrived once a year as a present for Chinese New Year. Her Eliza Doolittle “wouldn’t it be loverly?’ was to one day eat meat on a regular basis. If deprivation were not difficult enough, during school vacations the siblings were required to study textbooks so they would stand out academically. Although the sisters were held to rigid standards, her mother and father pinned their hopes on their only son. Of her tiger parents, Wendi recalled, they “were tough, and I was never good enough.”

 

At five foot ten inches tall, (Amazonian among her peers), the athletically gifted teen excelled at the local volleyball team. She participated in the sport as it supplied players with food and clothing. Her coach, Wang Chongshen, remembered her as the chief spiker-indicative of her innate competitive spirit. A grainy photo of a skinny girl with a bowl-cut haircut, standing in the back row of her team, remains a testament to her inauspicious roots. When her father received a transfer to Guangzhou, (formerly Canton), Wendi shared a bunk bed with her friend in her team’s dormitory. At age sixteen, to please her parents, Wendi enrolled in medical school. Her hope to escape from her communist country remained. She revealed, “In China, at that time, the idea of getting out and going to America was the stuff of dreams.” What further fueled Wendi to be part of the world beyond the Great Wall of China was a library book that held photographs of Manhattan’s Times Square. Another window to greener pastures was the movie The Sound of Music. She was enraptured with the family who escaped a brutal regime by trekking through the Alps en route to America. Wendi was to embark on a different midnight express, one that would have left Maria von Trapp slack jawed.

 

The genie in the bottle appeared when nineteen-year-old Wendi met Jake and Joyce Cherry. They had been among the first group of Americans to travel to China when the country had opened its borders to western businesses. Jake’s job was to assist in establishing a refrigeration factory. The family looked upon their time in Asia as their magical mystery tour. One afternoon, the Cherrys’ interpreter asked if they would be interested in meeting a teenager who wanted to improve her English by conversing with native speakers. In a nod to the Oscar Wilde admonition "that no good deed ever gors  unpunished," Joyce volunteered to tutor the young woman. The lessons ended when Joyce returned to California to enroll her two children in school. As Aesop warned about mice playing while the cat’s away, an infatuated Jake continued to see Wendi–and not to improve her communication skills. When Wendi shared her dream of studying in America, Jake tasked Joyce with filling out an application for a student visa. With the Cherrys acting as sponsors, Wendi enrolled in college. She roomed with the family and shared a bunk bed in their San Fernando Valley home with their five-year-old daughter. In addition to her studies, Wendi worked packing takeaway food in Sichuan Garden in Westwood, California. Allowed to have as much soup as she wanted, Wendi gained ten pounds. The owner fired her when she dropped a tray; her next job was selling Avon cosmetics.

 

The household arrangement imploded when Joyce discovered suggestive photos her husband had taken of Wendi in a Chinese hotel room. She evicted Wendi; her husband chose his lover over his wife. To make an honest woman of his mistress–and provide her with a green card–Jake wed his teenaged passion. Four months later, the newly minted Mrs. Cherry was spending time with David Wolf, who, in his mid-twenties, was only slightly her senior. Two years and seven months later–legal status under her belt– Wendi told the fifty-year-old Jake that he was merely a father figure and could never be anything else. The couple divorced, leaving a crushed Jake to mourn, “I loved that girl.” To his sorrow, Jake Cherry learned that his surname was a metaphor: his midlife crisis was representative of the pit in the core of a cherry.

 

Soon Wendi was passing herself off as Mrs. Wolf, although that was not reflective of her marital status. In keeping with her parents’ doctrine that education was the key to the kingdom, Wendi earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from California State University at Northridge. Rumor had it that David and his mother paid Wendi’s tuition when she enrolled in a Master of Business Administration at Yale. Whatever sounded the death knell of their affair, David only said it had left him “deeply wounded.”

 

To fulfill Yale’s requirement that students serve an internship, Wendi landed a coveted summer slot at Star TV, the Hong Kong station owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. The position not only fulfilled the ivy league requirement, it set the stage for the Shanghai girls' permanent state of shock and awe.

 

Through her assignment, Wendi moved in the same environ as media baron Rupert Murdoch, the possessor of a fortune estimated at between $11-$20 billion. His vast holdings included 21st Century Fox film studio, Fox News, the Times of London, National Geographic, New York Post, Harper Collins, and so forth, and so forth. At the juncture where Rupert met Wendi, he was looking for a new world to conquer. His crusade was to institute free market television in China in a move calculated to lure a billion new viewers. Securing the communist country became his great white whale, and when questioned about the direction of his company, he responded, “China, China, China, and China.” He soon had another obsession, a femme fatale who could have served as a James Bond love interest.

 

In Hong Kong, Wendi Deng proved the veracity of the adage that “fortune favors the brave.” According to the adage, “fortune favors the bold Rupert and Wendi first interacted during a meeting in Star TV’s Hong Kong headquarters. While his employees posed safe questions to their boss, Wendi, the possessor of state-of-the art-chutzpah, in heavily accented English, asked one of the world’s greatest businessmen, “Why is your China strategy so bad?” Her lack of sycophancy, along with her beauty, proved an aphrodisiac. What also made Rupert susceptible was his marriage to his second wife, Anna, the mother of three of his four children, had reached an impasse. An issue of contention was Anna wanted her husband to retire and spend time in their Los Angeles estate, or on their 155-foot yacht, Morning Glory. His mother, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, at age 100, cautioned her son that if he left Anna he would fall prey to the first designing woman who crossed his gold-strewn path. He reassured, her, “Don’t be ridiculous, Mum, I’m too old for that.”

 

Mum knew best. Soon Rupert was hot to trot for his intern and was shocked when Wendi spurned his advances. She said she had worked too hard and too long to become the other woman he would soon discard. Her tactic was in the vein of, “Treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen.” Rupert reassured her with the four most beautiful words a billionaire could utter, “I will marry you.” Wendi accepted. Punch spread the news, “MURDOCH’S MISTRESS, THE SECRET LIFE OF THE WOMAN WHO SNARED THE BIG ONE.” Other tantalizing headlines: “Viagra-chomping Rupert Murdoch has been dating a Cantonese cutie.”  A Murdoch employee stated, ‘The boss may be old enough to qualify for a bus pass, but they giggled like lovestruck teenagers.’” Though emulating the antics of adolescents, Wendi was thirty-one; Rupert was sixty-eight. 

 

A little over two weeks after the ink was dry on his divorce, Rupert wed wife number III. His mother, two ex-wives, and four children did not think thrice would prove the proverbial charm. The wedding venue was the garland-bedecked Morning Glory, moored in New York Harbor. The glittering lights of the Manhattan skyscrapers blinked the acknowledgement that Wendi had achieved the American Dream on steroids. Gathered for the ceremony were eighty-two guests such as Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky. For entertainment, Rupert had flown in the Welsh singing sensation Charlotte Church. The groom toasted his barefoot bride and promised he “loved her and would take care of her, forever and ever.”  Wendi declared the Morning Glory would be their retirement haven.

 

The press had a field day with the May December match. A 2000 article in The Washington Post eviscerated Wendi, especially in the manner she had amputated the joy from Joyce. As Wendi had not dwelled on her former love life, Rupert was aghast at her role in the break-up of a marriage that had taken a father from his minor children. The Murdoch family was likewise not in Camp Wendi. Anna confided to an interviewer, “I began to think that the Rupert I loved died a long time ago. The Rupert I fell in love with could not have behaved this way. It was so ruthless. No doubt Murdoch family dinners included the adjective gold-digger. To lessen the sting of terminating his three-decade long marriage to obtain a trophy wife, he provided Anna with $1.7 billion in assets and $110 million in cash. His mother was never as enraged in all her ninety-eight years and vowed she would never meet the siren who had cast her spell on her son.

 

While the Austrian former nun, Maria von Trapp, said that her favorite things were raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens, and warm winter mittens, the Chinese former volleyball player’s favorite things were far less prosaic. Wendi favored high-end couture, yachts that were floating palaces, and jet-setting. Through in vitro, the couple had daughters Grace, (born 2001) and Chloe, (born 2003). The Murdochs christened their girls on the banks of the Jordan River in approximation of the spot where Jesus had undergone the same ceremony. In attendance were godparents Queen Rania, Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. While the media head honcho has more than his fair share of detractors, “he has been called the big, bad, bastard” no one could label him a deadbeat dad. Murdoch the Munificent gave his six children $100 million in shares of his News Corporation empire. When he sold his media empire to Disney, the negotiation left his offspring $2 billion each.

 

Although Wendi’s Mt. Everest of disposable income could buy almost anything that struck her fancy, she could not always find acceptance in the circle whose members came from a far different world. Several of the mothers whose children attended the same school as Chloe and Grace made fun of Wendi’s heavily accented Chinese accent. They mocked her nouveaux riche pronouncements delivered in rapid-fire speech, “Rockefeller apartment, fifty-point-eight million. But we had to put twenty million into it. Gut renovation.” Another of her oft repeated comments, “Look at my daughters! So beautiful and so rich!”  During the occasions when the Murdoch sisters arrived in a chauffeur-driven car in the company of their nanny, the mean-lady moms turned the screw, “Those poor things. They never see their parents.”

 

The Shanghai girls must have shrieked, “Dang Deng!” as they mythologized the Chinese Cinderella who had undergone a metamorphosis from Wen Di Deng to Wendi Murdoch. She held the keys to a multitude of palatial homes. Their Manhattan base was a $44 million Fifth Avenue triplex, once the property of Laurance S. Rockefeller that held twenty rooms and 4,000 square feet of terraces overlooking Central Park. Other American beauties were in the zip codes of Beverly Hills and Carmel. The Murdochs also owned properties in London and Melbourne. As a love token, the uxorious husband purchased a mansion near the former imperial palace in China’s Forbidden City. Described as “fit for an emperor,” the estate consisted of 21, 500 square feet, and featured an underground swimming pool, golf course, and billiard room, a far cry from the 500-foot apartment of her childhood. No doubt her parents experienced an out of body experience when they paid a visit.

 

The Murdochs socialized with the world’s glitterati and dinners were spent in the company of what the Chinese call guanxi, “connections.” Wendi delighted in associating with the names of legend who provided additional nails with which to seal the coffin of her past. Place settings for dinners and events bore names of David Geffen, Larry Ellison, Bono, Diane von Furstenberg, Barbara Walters, Vera Wang, and Arianna Huffington. When the Murdochs lived in a condo in Trump Park Avenue, they were friendly with neighbors Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Their daughter, Arabella, practiced her Mandarin with Grace and Chloe. Grace and Chloe. Ivanka invited the Murdochs for Sabbath dinners where Wendi enjoyed what she called braided bread. In St. Barth’s where they sailed on their 180-foot sailboat, Wendi informed her husband she preferred cruising with Roman Abramovich, (the Russian oligarch), as he had a bigger and better boat. After touring the superior craft, Rupert admitted he had never felt so poor in all his life. Later, when Rupert balked at buying an upgraded model, Wendi told Michael Wolff, author of a Murdoch biography, “His whole family like this. They so cheap.” To reach their innumerable homes and international playgrounds, the Murdochs’ jet, a renovated Boeing 737, stood on standby. The girl who had slept on bunk beds  met Queen Elizabeth II. 

 

Marriage to Wendi resulted in a tycoon metamorphosis: Rupert darkened his hair and traded his suit and ties for black slacks and turtlenecks. However, marriage did not change Rupert as greatly as it did Wendi, a fact she revealed when she and Arianna Huffington cohosted a book release party for Kathy Freston’s weight-loss book, The Lean, to which they invited Martha Stewart and Harvey Weinstein. In deference to Kathy’s vegetarianism, the caterers served hors d’oeuvres of tofu, quinoa, and kale. Wendi toasted her guests, “I grew up so poor in China that one day I aspired to have meat regularly. Now that I can have meat three times a day, Kathy tells us we can’t have any meat at all.”

 

In an incident that the greatest of publicists could not have orchestrated, Wendi garnered the spotlight. In 2011, Rupert was testifying before a British parliamentary subcommittee that was investigating the illegal phone hacking of his The News of the World. Behind him, the essence of the stand-by-your-man spouse, Wendi filled his water glass, nudged him when he started to doze off, and calmed him down when he pounded the table to emphasize his point. While Rupert’s 20^th Century Fox had produced The Devil Wears Prada, Wendi wore Chanel–a pink blazer along with a black pencil skirt. During her ministrations,  Wendi noticed a man hurl a shaving-cream pie, perched on a paper plate, at her husband. Switching to tiger-wife mode, channeling her youthful volleyball skills, she sprung from her chair and delivered a right-handed hook at the protestor, Jonathan May-Bowles, known by his stage name Jonnie Marbles. She then hurried to wipe the foam from her husband’s suit. The image of Wendi literally leaping to her tycoon’s defense transformed her from harridan to heroine. Tom Watson, a member of Parliament, stated, “Mr. Murdoch, your wife has a very good left hook.” Wonder Woman Wendi’s act showed why she never employed a bodyguard. She said she never need professional protection because, “I can do anything.” The woman with the good left hook told a journalist, “We have a pretty good life.”

 

One would assume that a woman who had escaped dire poverty to a Mt. Everest of wealth would spend every spare moment at the nearest church reciting “Hail Mary,” but Wendi was cut from a different cloth. Whether from their age difference or divergent childhoods–Rupert was brought up in wealth in Australia–the couple began to lead increasingly separate lives. While he often retired early to bed, Wendi was at the Oscars, the Met Gala, or the White House at a dinner for Chinese president Hu Jintao. Not content to be a stay-at-home mom, Wendi produced the movie Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, based on a Lisa See novel. The plot centered on two women, (laotong which means old friends), who find in each other the emotional connection lacking in their marriages. A staple at Parisian fashions shows, sheathed in Chanel, Wendi sat beside Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue. She spent an evening dining with Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel’s head honcho.  

 

If Wendi had studied history rather than business administration, she may have learned a lesson from Roman history. Suspecting his wife, Pompeia, had been unfaithful, the cesar arranged for his divorce. The end of the marriage led to the proverb, “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicions.” However, in an act of hubris, Wendi looked for romance with various partners. Cracks formed in the Murdoch marriage when rumors–substantiated by the domestic help–circulated that Wendi had embarked on affairs with Chris De Wolfe, the founder of Myspace, and Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google. What really set tongues wagging was when former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had business dealings with Rupert, dropped by when only the missus was at home. Because Tony always arrived accompanied by his security detail, he could not slip unobtrusively though the back door. Rupert’s private humiliation became public when the police investigated his newspaper’s phone hacking allegations. To unearth evidence to counter the charges, Rupert’s employees sifted through millions of emails where they found an incriminating one from Mrs. Murdoch, a cyber diary that Wendi would have preferred remained private. The leaked email was an ode to infatuation, “Oh, shit, oh, shit. Whatever why I’m so so missing Tony. Because he is so so charming and his clothes are so good. He has such good body and he has really really good legs Butt.... And he is slim tall and good skin. Pierce blue eyes which I love. Love his eyes. Also I love his power on the stage... and what else and what else and what else...” The media had a frenzy over the “what else.” The email also elicited scrutiny over an ambiguity: Was the “Butt” a misspelt pronoun at the beginning of a sentence fragment? Or was it an allusion to Tony’s backside?” 

 

In response to the smoking hot, smoking-gun email, the eighty-year-old Rupert ended his association with Tony. In a move that left her blindsided, the husband who was infuriated at his horns also filed for divorce in a lawsuit whose boilerplate phrase stated that the “relationship between husband and wife has broken down irretrievably.” He confided to his oldest son, Lachlan, marrying Wendi had been a mistake. Forever had come with an expiration date. The tycoon’s attorney was Ira E. Garr whose previous high profile client had been Ivana Trump. From New York to Los Angels to Washington to London, the tabloids indulged in a feeding frenzy. Although an unwilling participant in airing his dirty laundry, Rupert understood his divorce would oil any number of printing presses. One could imagine the horrified whispers of the Shanghai girls. In the divorce settlement, Wendi received the Manhattan triplex, ($60-$70 million), the Beijing home ($10-40 million), and a cash settlement of $14 million, one for each year of the Murdoch marriage. She also kept her jewelry, yacht, and half their art collection. 

 

In a nod to you can’t keep a good billionaire down, three years later Rupert took his fourth walk down the aisle with Jerry Hall, the Texas super model and former wife of Mick Jagger. Wendi said of her successor, “I’ve met Jerry only briefly once, when she dropped off Grace. She seems very nice, and my girls like her. I always tell them to treat her kindly. She’s their father’s wife.” At least she was till Jerry and Rupert’s 2022 divorce. At age ninety-three, he married wife VI, the Russian-born Elena Zhukova, whose ex-son-in-law was oligarch billionaire Roman Abramovich.

 

Unlike Rupert, the Australian Henry VIII, Wendi never remarried though that does not equate to her life as a testosterone-free zone. One of her liaisons was the British violinist Charlie Siem who accompanied her to a Parisian fashion show. When the press asked if he was her date, Wendi replied, “Why not? Am I supposed to be shy?” Shy is indeed not an apt adjective for Ms. Deng. At age forty-eight, she had a two-year affair with a twenty-one-year-old hunky Hungarian model, with whom she cavorted on a St. Barts beach. Rumor had it that Wendi was involved in a clandestine affair with Russian president Vladimir Putin. She brushed aside the gossip with the comment she had never met him. The denial was a disappointment; the match would have provided her ex-husband’s media empire with copious copy.

 

As with many high-profile women, Wendi is a polarizing figure. Is she a Machiavellian Murdoch, a serial cat burglar whose prey is men she uses as steppingstones? Her detractors labelled her the contemporary Yellow Peril and an Olympian opportunist.  Celebrity blogger Hung Huang stated that those who cast aspersion are best described by the Chinese phrase, “xianmu-jidu-hen,” which translates to “envy-jealousy hatred.” Is it a knee-jerk reaction to look at those who have far more than enough as anti-Robin Hoods? Should one blame Ms. Deng for her Darwinian desire to survive the privations of her childhood by employing the Napoleon philosophy, “The ends justify the means.”

 

The 1969 Bobbie Gentry song “Fancy,” encapsulates the angst of a girl whose only exit from her New Orleans shack was capitalizing on male lust. Her mother’s plea, “Lord, forgive me for what I do/But if you want out, it’s up to you.” Can one sit in judgment on Wendi Deng who used whatever means at her disposal to escape the shackle of Shanghai.

 

 

 

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