Several years ago, before his troubles began, Conrad Black, a figure of great hauteur and bristle (if not menace), snubbed me at a Manhattan dinner party. I am sure this was not a conscious act on his part. Rather, he occupied a closed circle and even my presence at the same table did not get me in.
But now, suddenly, in our leveling time, I’m getting more attention from Conrad than I know what to do with.
This is partly because he is in jail, with lots of time on his hands (when he is not otherwise trying to get a pardon from the departing president). And partly because I am the biographer of the man who most haunts Black’s dreams, Rupert Murdoch. And partly because it’s Black himself who now wants attention.
(AP Image)
Two weeks ago, Black, the former proprietor of the Telegraph papers in London, the Chicago Sun-Times in Chicago, and the Jerusalem Post, reviewed my book about Murdoch for Tina Brown’s Web site with sweeping and thundering dismissal, making it clear that Black viewed himself as the only credible expert on Murdoch. He returned to the subject the other day in another diatribe on the Brown site. This time his point of apoplexy seemed to be my implication that his status in a federal prison somehow made his views less legitimate. I am, Black suggests, hopelessly middle class in my evident assumption that several felony convictions might carry a moral onus and that US prisons are not filled with reasonable, honorable, and innocent men.
I agree with Black—being in prison certainly does not remove his right to have an opinion about my book. My point, however, was a further one. It was that he was hired (such as bloggers are “hired”) as a figure of fun. His pompous fulminating from a jail cell was a comedic turn. Indeed, Tina Brown, who was herself at the dinner party on the occasion when I spied Black (Tina was up close murmuring to him), rightly anticipated that the mere mention of Murdoch to Black would provoke all manner of spitting and hissing and wounded-beast reaction. The comic point here was that Black, who once presumed to compete with Murdoch, who was once obsessed with trying to be Murdoch, was now reduced to reviewing the greater man’s biography from prison—a biography that, indeed, dismisses their rivalry as insignificant in Murdoch’s career. Such a review, whether he knew or not, was about Black’s fall.
And yet, humiliation can lead to stardom, which leads to rehabilitation. If Lord Black (that appellation must sting in the prison yard) would be willing to play the role of the wronged, misunderstood mogul, insisting, against all evidence and with wild-eyed tirades and denunciations, on his innocence, I’ll be his foil.
Apparently, you get Internet access in a federal pen, so are there Web cams? Can we do something here? I’m open to a spectacle.
