Great Snugglebunnies of Our Time

The revulsion old people inspire in us betrays our terror at the near-inevitability of our own eventual decrepitude. Many men will come to resemble Rupert Murdoch in key ways as they enter their 80s — the lavishly creased and saggy faces, the enlarged ears and nose, the truly hideous necks — but only the richest very few will have a Wendi Deng on their arms. Many see that as another good reason to despise the rich. I prefer to despise them for other things, and maintain that Wendi did not marry Rupert for his tens of billions, but for his personality — because he is, as she has confided to friends, “one of the great snugglebunnies of this, or any other, time, irrepressibly vivacious, full of mischief and fun, and an imaginative, considerate lover.”

The couple met when she was singing with a Blondie tribute band in her native Xuzhou, Jiangsu, and several News Corp. executives, in town to try to persuade the local cable provider to offer his subscribers the Fox network, popped on a whim into the Four Happiness nightclub. Murdoch’s love of “new wave” music is well known; Martha & The Muffins are said to be on call 24 hours a day when he’s in Toronto in case he fancies a command performance. Murdoch reportedly remarked to other executives at the Four, as it’s known to local hipsters, “Deborah Harry she ain’t,” during Deng’s performance, but that didn’t stop him from buying the club the next morning to get her phone number and email address.

At first, she declined to go out with him, as she’d been dating the group’s bass player, but Murdoch induced the lad to disappear by offering him membership in Martha & The Muffins. When they finally spoke on the phone, Deng reportedly fretted aloud about Murdoch’s being 57 years her senior, but the media tycoon dispelled her misgivings by pointing out, with a wink that onlookers unanimously described as “winsome”, that “age is just a number”. They went out for Chinese food, and then picked flowers in the meadow behind the factory in which some 80 percent of the shopping trolleys in use in Europe are manufactured. The English pop singer Elton John and his band, flown over specially for the occasion, performed a set of unplugged gender-neutral love songs, between which the late Rod McKuen, the English-speaking world’s best-selling poet of the last century, recited. Deng later told confidants it was the most romantic afternoon she’d ever spent with anyone over 68. 

By that evening, Murdoch’s heart was clearly no longer his own, and he insisted that Deng come dancing with him in Beijing, to which they traveled in the private jet he’d had rechristened Wendi in her honor. Unbeknownst to her, he’d flown Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band flown over for the evening. When the band reached the verse of "Born to Run" that begins, “Wendy, let me in; I want to be your friend. I want to guard your dreams and visions,” Deng reportedly burst into tears, though she had no idea who Springsteen was, and gave Murdoch his first kiss, on the cheek. They may have made love that night for the first time, and they may not have. It is no one’s business but their own.