THE BATTLE OF NEW YORK

The National Guard had sealed off lower Manhattan when the great beast was first sighted, and helicopter gunships buzzed like giant killer bees over the East River. But the beast was undeterred. Lusting for some nameless trophy, he climbed down from the top of the New York Post building and lumbered up Second Avenue toward the deserted offices of New York magazine...

To many New Yorkers, that tale would have seemed only slightly more bizarre than the melodrama unfolding on their front pages and television screens last week. Rupert Murdoch --the furry-browed, softspoken, intensely competitive Australian owner of ten major newspapers, 13 magazines and dozens of lesser publications--had no sooner established himself as the owner of the city's only afternoon paper, the Post (circ. 500,000), than he was making a surprise bid to buy control of the New York Magazine Co. New York Founding Editor Clay Felker, meanwhile, canvassed millionaires around the world for help in fighting the takeover attempt, and even asked the Justice Department to examine the antitrust implications of the whole affair. After a pageant of dramatic late-night board meetings and a spirited ballet of lawyers swirling into court, however, New York magazine finally got a new master--and America a new press lord.

That spectacle would have made a King Kong-size story for New York, the small but influential weekly that celebrates the life-styles of the city's rich, its powerful and its houseplant owners. (Felker's editors indeed commissioned Cartoonist David Levine to draw a stinging cover portrait of Murdoch as one of those South American killer bees beloved of Murdoch-style tabloids; Felker thought better of it eventually.) But there almost was no new issue of New York. Nearly all the magazine's 125-member staff walked out in support of Felker, and only some last-minute help from the new owner got the issue to press. Felker, meanwhile, went off to start a new magazine.

The siege of New York was not just another neighborhood rumble on the tight little island that is the nation's publishing capital. New York Magazine Co., with revenues of $26 million last year, not only publishes the much-imitated New York (circ. 375,000) and the nation's leading counterculture weekly newspaper, the Village Voice (circ. 162,000), but has already started its own invasion of the West Coast with the successful launching last April of New West (circ. 290,000). The company's takeover by Rupert Murdoch marks an important new addition to the largely sex-and-scandal press empire that Murdoch is building in Australia, Britain and the U.S. It also marks Murdoch's emergence as a major presence in U.S. journalism. Having committed roughly $45 million to his twin gambles within the past two months, Murdoch appears to control ample amounts of money, and, as he proved last week, he is accomplished at quick takeovers.

The story of Murdoch's latest foray begins with Clay Felker, the gifted but erratic editor who virtually invented New York (see box). He first met Murdoch about four years ago at the Virginia home of Washington Post Chairman Katharine Graham. Felker takes credit for introducing Murdoch to Post Publisher Dorothy Schiff, and after Murdoch bought Schiff's ailing Post, Felker offered advice on ways to improve the paper. The two men were frequent companions and even explored a few joint ventures, including a London version of New York and a London-style Sunday newspaper for New York City.

In one of their early conversations, Felker, who owns only 10.2% of New York Magazine Co., complained about his board of directors. Felker had been feuding with the directors since 1971, when he threatened to resign if they did not make him chairman. They did not, and neither did he resign. The board, in turn, has long been unhappy about Felker's high living and low profits. Last year it turned down his demand for a 25% raise in his $120,000 annual salary, a house of his own in Long Island's Gatsbyesque Hamptons and company purchase of his seigneurial Manhattan duplex. The firm in 1976 suffered its first operating loss in years ($700,000). One reason: Felker spent four times his original $ 1 million estimate to launch New West, renting expensive office space, bunking visiting staff members in lavish hotel suites and even leasing Alfa Romeos for two transplanted New York editors. The major expense, however, has been New West 's reliance on unprofitable cut-rate introductory subscriptions -- which is not to say the magazine will not turn out to be a large success. Meanwhile NYM stock limped along on the over-the-counter market last year at $2 to $3 a share, down from an original $10.

Less than two months ago, Felker casually asked Murdoch if he would be interested in helping Felker shore up his defenses against the board by buying an interest in the company. His specific target was Carter Burden, a socialite city councilman who had got 23.8% of NYM stock when Felker bought Burden's Village Voice two years ago. Murdoch said yes, but only if he could control the company. He even offered to sell Felker New West. Felker, who wanted complete control himself, was not sure he liked those ideas, and the whole matter was dropped.

Or so Felker thought. Without Felker's knowledge, Murdoch began negotiating directly with Burden and a number of other leading shareholders. Felker had first claim on any sale of Burden's shares, so he sought the help of Katharine Graham. She agreed to bid $7 a share, then $7.50, then $8.25, matching Murdoch's offer at every step. But while Graham and Felker dealt with an increasingly uncooperative Burden by telephone to Sun Valley, Idaho, where Burden was on a skiing trip, Murdoch was schussing toward the resort aboard a private jet. There, on New Year's Day, he closed the deal.

Over that weekend, Murdoch amassed not only Burden's 23.8% interest but a total of just over 50% of the company from 13 shareholders. Total price: $7.6 million. At a directors' meeting on Monday, Murdoch demanded two seats on the board--and got them--but said: "Clay, I think you're an editorial genius. I want you to stay and run the magazine." Felker refused. Murdoch later observed: "Clay is an editor who wants to be a businessman. I am a businessman who wants to be an editor."

But Felker was beaten even before he started. His first mistake had been the transfer of nearly a quarter of the company to Burden (whom he last week called "an incompetent dilettante") two years ago for the Village Voice. As for his second mistake, the Voice's own press columnist, Alexander Cockburn, explained it nicely: "Having popped his head into the lion's cage to ask the beast within about problems allied with meat eating, Clay took himself off about his business, leaving the door of the lion cage thoughtlessly ajar."

Felker struggled to close it. His lawyers got a temporary injunction from U.S. District Court Judge Thomas P. Griesa against Burden's sale of stock to Murdoch. Griesa scheduled a hearing on the matter, but Felker and his allies kept delaying it as they scoured the globe for new sources of cash: British Industrialist Sir James Goldsmith, Cincinnati Financier Carl Lindner, and an unidentified New York real estate baron. But after contemplating the prospects of a protracted court fight with Murdoch, Felker's prospective backers all declined the challenge.

Felker might have conceded defeat sooner if it had not been for the almost unanimous opposition of his New York staff, which he himself helped stir up, to the thought of working for Murdoch. They caucused, held press conferences and finally walked out. Felker had to traipse around the streets one afternoon late in the week, peering into restaurant windows trying to locate his troops so that the magazine could go to press. He found them in a nearby McDonald's, but they refused to move. Felker and Design Director Milton Glaser tried to put out the issue themselves, and gave up; the staff had hidden the press-ready pages all over the office. Finally Murdoch sent over a crew of his own editors, who, with the help of some NYM directors, found the material and flew it at dawn to the printing plant in Buffalo, a day late.

Why all the indignation by New York staffers at the Australian? Some press and character students thought Felker and Murdoch were made for each other. New York is not above publishing trash itself, but "classy trash," as Writer Richard Reeves put it. Murdoch, he feared, would bring "trash trash." Said Reeves: "I would be ashamed to have my name associated with it." Felker's faithful hussars also hoped their solidarity would strengthen his position in dealing with Murdoch. Felker insists that it did: "Murdoch would have rolled over me much quicker without it."

Murdoch rolled over him soon enough. Under orders from Judge Griesa, the two rivals finally sat down at week's end. "It was an unhappy meeting," says Felker, "to sit there with a former friend, to have to negotiate the end of one's dream." Felker that night sent a lawyer to Murdoch's apartment to work out details of a surrender. Shortly before dawn both sides accepted it, and Felker broke the news to his staff in a tearful barroom gathering.

All things considered, Felker did not do badly. He will be paid $1.5 million for his shares, plus his $120,000 salary for three years, and he will be given an extra year to repay $300,000 that the company lent him. Felker will leave New York immediately and cannot work for or buy two direct competitors, Los Angeles and New York's Cue. Managing editors of New York, the Voice and New West, as well as the ten most senior New York writers, will be given two-year contracts. As for Felker, "I'm going to start a new publication," he told TIME. He was sketchy on details, but said that he had received three offers of backing last week and that Milton Glaser would join him in the new venture, which would be based in New York. Said Felker: "We're going to do it all over again."

Felker's employees, and not a few readers, were left to ponder an uncertain fate at the hands of their new publisher--whose foreign magazines include little more sophisticated than Britain's Licensed Bookmaker and Betting Office Proprietor. But from the tables up at Elaine's to the paneled Wall Street suites, observers of the American press were wondering: Who is this formidable foreigner, and what does he want?

Keith Rupert Murdoch was born 45 years ago into a prosperous Melbourne newspaper family. His grandfather, a poor Presbyterian minister, migrated to Australia from Scotland in 1884. Rupert's father, Sir Keith Murdoch, started as a reporter for the Melbourne Age, earned worldwide fame for exposing squalid conditions and low morale among Australian soldiers at Gallipoli and went on to serve as chairman of Australia's Herald newspaper group. "My father was a great influence and a great example," says Murdoch. "I was steeped in journalism."

Murdoch and his three sisters enjoyed a pastoral childhood, shuttling between the family's comfortable home in suburban Melbourne and a rolling sheep ranch in the country--until the only son was ten, and his parents dispatched him to fashionable Geelong Grammar School. "As a child of someone fairly prominent in the media, I got more than my share of abuse and leg-pulling," recalls Murdoch--and less than his share of schooling. Shy, academically slow and athletically inept, Rupert was scorned by both students and masters. Perhaps to enhance his stature, he became a professed radical. His nickname: "Red Rupert." From Geelong he went to Oxford, where he was once banned from a student political club for the ungentlemanly sin of campaigning for office.

As Murdoch was about to finish his studies--he graduated without distinction --his father died. Though Sir Keith had been chief executive of one of the nation's largest newspaper chains, he held little stock, and death duties ate up most of that. The Murdoch family was left with a tired pair of newspapers in the southern Australian city of Adelaide and a radio station in remote Broken Hill. Says a friend: "That experience taught him the importance of 51% control." Rupert set out to accomplish what his father had not. First he talked Sir Keith's longtime friend, the capricious Lord Beaverbrook, into letting him apprentice as a $40-a-week subeditor on the London Daily Express. Then, at age 22, Murdoch went home to help run the Adelaide News and Sunday Mail.

He learned fast. When a rival daily quietly tried to buy the papers away from him, Murdoch front-paged the offer, accompanying it with an editorial thundering against the evils of press monopoly. When an aborigine was accused of murder on dubious evidence, Murdoch's papers sprang to his defense; that unpopular act earned his small company a trial and subsequent acquittal on charges of seditious libel.

While building the family fortune, Murdoch loved to visit the radio station at Broken Hill, a mining city. There the prime diversion was Murdoch's favorite pastime, gambling --specifically, the Australian national game of two-up, which is nothing more than flipping two coins at once (two heads you win; two tails you lose; one of each, toss again). As Murdoch is quoted by his biographer, onetime London Journalist Simon Regan: "I love to play it. You bet on a run. You go in with a couple of quid and two, four, eight, you double it all the time. If you're betting on, say, heads, you can make hundreds if you get a run. Then it comes down tails and you're all through. The real game is the gamble on exactly when to stop."

Murdoch had never played two-up with a newspaper, and he was eager to try for a run. So in 1956 he bought a Sunday paper in Perth for $400,000, then four years later spent $4 million for the Sydney Daily Mirror, a racy tabloid weakened by incessant circulation wars. His Sydney invasion literally touched off new fighting. When Murdoch outbid a rival publisher for an Anglican Church printing plant, the rival tried to occupy the building. Murdoch allies rounded up a gang of hammer-wielding thugs and recaptured the plant after a bloody fight. At the same time, Murdoch turned the Mirror into a catalogue of crime and cheesecake, and it battled the rival Sun to a standstill.

The Sydney experience gave Murdoch a taste for combat --and a lot of cash. By 1968 his holdings included newspapers, magazines and broadcasting stations worth an estimated $50 million. He decided it was time to invade London. For $20 million he outbid British Book Publisher Robert Maxwell to win a controlling interest in News of the World, a Sunday scandal sheet (circ. 6 million). A year later, he bought the ailing daily Sun (circ. 950,000) for the bargain-basement price of $500,000. The Sun was a paper aimed at high-minded Labor Party supporters then, but Murdoch imported his Sydney-tested approach, and circulation picked up. He shocked many Britons, for example, by rehashing the randy memoirs of Call Girl Christine Keeler in his News of the World. Private Eye, a London satirical magazine, labeled him the "Dirty Digger."* Talk Show Host David Frost dragged him onto TV one evening and publicly belabored him over the Keeler affair. (Murdoch some months later bought a major interest in London Weekend Television, a production company partly owned by Frost, and fired dozens.) Murdoch mostly ignored his incessant vilification in the British press and kept pointing to his papers' increasing circulation. But the attacks evidently reinforced his grammar school anxiety over being considered an outsider. "I guess I have grown a bit introverted," Murdoch concedes. "You get bruised in life."

Still, Murdoch went cruising for another bruising. Says one friend: "Australia is a small society, and Britain is a decaying one. So he went to America." Murdoch started in San Antonio, one of only three major U.S. cities with competing afternoon dailies (the others: Baltimore and Philadelphia). In a single day he flew into San Antonio and, without even touring the plant of the Express-News, bought it for $18 million. His next effort was an unsuccessful bid for the Washington Star. "We knew it was very difficult to buy any large viable newspaper in the U.S., except for astronomical figures," he recalls. "So I said, 'Let's start something in the popular field.' " Result: the National Star, a spirited tabloid teeming with sports, advice and mild thrills ("Ferocious swarms of man-killing bees are buzzing their way toward North America ..."). It almost was Murdoch's own Gallipoli. He lavished $6 million on TV promotion and went through five editors, finally turning more toward women's service features. Now known as the Star (circ. 1.6 million), it is marginally profitable.

Last year Murdoch was thinking about launching a new daily in New York or Boston when aging Publisher Dorothy Schiff, 73, told him she was thinking of selling her New York Post. Murdoch pounced, wrapping up the $30 million sale in three weeks of secret negotiations. Thus it was only a few weeks ago that a significant number of Americans first heard of the Australian and wondered where he had been all this time. Surprise: Murdoch had been living in the U.S. full time for nearly three years.

For a man whose newspapers cavort through the private lives of others, Murdoch is fiercely protective of his own. He rarely grants interviews or allows photographers to snap pictures of his four children: a daughter, Prudence, 18, from a first marriage and three children, Elisabeth, 8, Lachlan, 5, and James, 4, by his wife Anna, 32, a stunningly attractive, quick-witted former Sydney Daily Mirror reporter, whom he married in 1967. Six years ago, in London, Anna was the target of a kidnap attempt in which the wife of a Murdoch lieutenant was murdered. Murdoch did not stop his plebeian practice of taking the subway to work every day, but he hired bodyguards.

After the Star was born in 1974, Murdoch sold his 120-acre farm outside London and moved his family to Manhattan. There he is shuttled by chauffeured Cadillac from his Star office to Dolly Schiff's old suite at the Post to his twelve-room Fifth Avenue duplex, which is crowded with English antiques and modern Australian art. At a restored colonial farmhouse upstate, Rupert keeps trim by riding, skiing, swimming (40 laps in his pool) and thrashing around on a tennis court. He once challenged a group of his editors to play him, without their tennis shoes. "We have an old-fashioned marriage," says Anna, who is studying for a bachelor's degree at New York's Fordham University. "He's good with the children, although he's not a wrestly daddy. He's afraid he'll rumple his tie."

Murdoch is seldom seen without tie, vest and stylish Savile Row suit. The Murdochs occasionally entertain at home. More often, they like to invite a few friends (among them: Murdoch Executives Richard Sarazen and George Viles and, until now, Clay Felker) to dine at a tony restaurant like Le Madrigal. Out-of-town visitors are taken for a Kong's-eye view of Manhattan and a feast at the top of the World Trade Center, and Rupert sometimes takes Anna for a quiet lobster dinner at The Palm restaurant. "I'm a bit dull and humorless, not the sort of person who makes social friends easily," Murdoch contends. "This sounds corny, but my best friend is my wife."

Second best is probably the telephone. A reluctant memo writer (though a prolific doodler), Murdoch directs his far-flung empire almost entirely by phone. For an hour most nights, he conducts a long-distance seance (at $3 a minute) with Ken May, his Australian proconsul, from the 18th century desk in his study. Murdoch can be a telephonic terror. Pubs full of sacked editors in London and Sydney curse his quick temper, his reluctance to dispense praise--or raises--and his Darwinian penchant for giving two editors overlapping responsibility and letting them fight it out. "A cute piece of psychology," says one longtime Murdoch man, "but it makes life hellish for us all."

Though his newspapers are generally cash registers, Murdoch does not coddle his journalists. Salaries are barely competitive, and working conditions are sometimes worse. "Everything is done on the cheap," says a Murdoch reporter in Australia. "Typewriters have to be shared, and we're always short of desks and chairs." Once, one blistering summer afternoon, when Australian staffers in Melbourne threatened to strike unless Murdoch installed air conditioning, he strode the length of the office and shouted, "This is a bloody palace! I don't know what you're complaining about!" The staff went back to work; air-cooling equipment was installed some time later.

Murdoch has his crotchets. He once ordered all his racing correspondents to wear hats on the job and enjoined other reporters from going tieless. He is also reported to dislike suede shoes, radicals, beards and bermuda shorts. At one time he had a fetish for clean desks. He sometimes used to march through his newsrooms and sweep papers from cluttered desks onto the floor, muttering, "The place is like a pigsty!"

Why do people work for Murdoch? For one thing, he can on occasion be startlingly generous, whisking an editor and his wife off on a Caribbean vacation after disrupting the man's home life with extra work. For another, Murdoch is often right down in the pits with his own diggers. When he is changing a newspaper's format, he often spends late nights in the composing room, sleeves rolled up and tie askew. He personally broke Australia's biggest scoop in years, the 1976 disclosure that former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam may have been involved in his party's solicitation of a $500,000 campaign contribution from Iraqi agents. Murdoch wrote the story himself on deadline in ten minutes. On his first day at the Post last week, he showed up in the pressroom before dawn--a custom he plans to continue at least once a month. The printers were shocked. Says Murdoch: "They'd never seen a publisher before."

His employees may see a lot of him, but they rarely learn much about his empire. The Murdoch kingdom consists chiefly of Cruden Investments (named after his grandfather's Scottish parsonage), a family holding company owned jointly by Murdoch, his mother and his three sisters. Cruden owns 40% of News Ltd., which controls the Australian holdings. News Ltd., in turn, owns 48% of News International Ltd., which controls the British holdings. News International Ltd. and News Ltd. together own 100% of his American holdings. The $30 million Murdoch paid for the Post came one-third each from London, Sydney and New York. He bought his interest in New York Magazine Co. mostly with some $5 million in loose cash from Post coffers. (He did not have to use Post money; Murdoch is known as one of the best credit risks on Wall Street.) Altogether, Murdoch family-controlled properties are worth more than $100 million. Rupert's personal share of that is about $8 million. His insistence on having a controlling interest in each operation effectively precludes any danger of a takeover and ensures that he will be able to pass on a journalism empire to his heirs--which was his father's unfulfilled dream.

One legacy that Murdoch has not done much to preserve is his influence on politics. Not that he is unwilling to use his papers to change events--as he did in 1972 by helping to elect Australia's Laborite Prime Minister Gough Whitlam (with secret, though legal, contributions of $90,000) and again in 1975, when he campaigned vigorously in his publications for Whitlam's ouster on grounds of incompetence. So vigorously, in fact, that some of his Australian staff briefly walked out in protest. But unlike Britain's Lord Beaverbrook--who once boasted, "We have a system, you know. I speak at this end and there is a machine at the other end and it comes out as a leading article"--Murdoch likes to allow his editorialists some discretion. Says he: "If I saw an editorial I didn't agree with I wouldn't say 'Cut it out,' I'd say 'Do you really know what you're doing?' "

Murdoch's own political opinions are somewhat murky. Red Rupert has over the years become a stout opponent of the "European-style socialism" that he sees stalking Britain, Australia and the U.S. But evidently Murdoch did not see such a threat in Jimmy Carter, for he ordered his San Antonio papers to endorse the Democratic candidate, about whom he says, "I have some fears but lots of hopes."

Murdoch's journalistic preferences are more distinct. The U.S. paper he most respects is the Wall Street Journal ("They know what they are doing"), but he most enjoys wallowing in the New York Times ("comprehensive, wonderful," though occasionally guilty of "stupidity and shallowness"). He thinks American newspapers take themselves too seriously and he finds American reporters generally lazy. "They tend to write essays," he says. "The facts are not in the first two paragraphs. The role of a newspaper is to inform, but in such a way that people buy your paper. It is not for us to say what public taste ought to be."

Murdoch has followed that rule relentlessly, particularly in London, where he catered to the tastes of the working and lower middle classes. His first major purchase there, the News of the World, had long offered a hugely popular neo-Victorian mixture of sex and crime, but Murdoch added what he likes to call "investigative sting." A recent expose of orgies in a fashionable section of London, for example, quoted one merrymaker's description of a blonde who "had every man in the room from midnight until 7 in the morning, encouraged by her husband in his wheelchair." On the same front page a headline proclaimed: SAILOR WHO TURNED INTO A GIRL WITCH. The story told how a merchant seaman, who had a sex-change operation 13 years ago, was now not only the common-law wife of a docker in Southampton but the visiting high priestess of a local coven.

Murdoch's approach was even more strikingly demonstrated in his renovation of the Sun. He made it the first newspaper in Britain to show bare breasts, and the cheeky bit of crumpet regularly poised on page three helped drive circulation from 950,000 in 1969 to 3,800,000 today. Murdoch justifies such tactics on competitive grounds, but he also offers an aesthetic defense: "You never see a suggestive picture. It's always a tasteful and glamorous girl to brighten a lot of people's breakfast tables."

When Parliament is in session, the Sun does run a page or more of tightly written political news, and often clearly explains complicated issues. But the Sun makes no effort to report the news of what is happening in Britain, let alone the world. It concentrates on sports, gossip about TV stars and sex, mostly sex. Sample headlines: I'LL STILL SHARE A TENT WITH SHARON; GREEN-EYED SEX FIEND IS HUNTED; APACHE STRIP PUTS PARSON ON WARPATH--a story about a male entertainer named Apache who stripped off his clothes while performing at a women's bingo party to raise money to buy a water bed for a priest.

In his first American venture, San Antonio's morning Express and the afternoon News, Murdoch again showed little interest in politics. Neither paper staffed the state or national political conventions, although each sends sportswriters as far away as Seattle to follow the Spurs, the city's pro basketball team. Pitting the News against Hearst's Light, Murdoch began a circulation war that increased his paper's sales by 18,000, to 78,000, while his rivals' dropped slightly, to 125,000. The fight brought out the worst in both publications. After turning the News front page into a graphic jungle of black boxes and red arrows, Murdoch provided a daily diet of rape and mayhem, tortured tots and killer bees. One classic story: "A divorced epileptic, who told police she was buried alive in a bathtub full of wet cement and later hanged upside down in the nude, left San Antonio for good this weekend. The tiny, half-blind woman, suffering from diabetes, recounted for the News a bizarre horror story filled with rape, torture and starvation."

Today the front page of the News is virtually devoid of substantial news. On Dec. 20 the paper led with a review that proclaimed, "Not going to see King Kong is like passing up a chance to see one of the wonders of the world." The main story was about a defensive lineman for the Philadelphia Eagles who had been knifed to death. Only the diligent reader would have discovered that Jimmy Carter had just nominated three Cabinet members, including Griffin Bell as Attorney General.

The morning Express, with no opposition to fight, is far more respectable, although its slogan--TEXAS' GREATEST MORNING NEWSPAPER--causes derisive laughter in the city rooms of the Houston Post and the Dallas Times Herald. The Express covers local news reasonably well and runs Columnists James Reston, James J. Kilpatrick and Jack Anderson. It is no better or worse than a dozen other papers in cities of similar size. Even Murdoch finds it "a little gray."

Murdoch's chief bastion of legitimacy is The Australian, his home country's only national newspaper, which he founded in 1964 and refers to as his "flagship." The Australian is a good, solid journal of politics, business and criticism, paying attention to the arts as well as to sports. There is no paper like it in the U.S. Although writing and perceptions are inferior, The Australian is vaguely reminiscent of London's Observer, which Murdoch vainly tried to buy last year as part of his drive for respectability in Britain. Ironically, The Australian has never made money.

In Murdoch's most important new venture, the few changes wrought so far at the somnolent New York Post during his first week of ownership are mostly benign. He has picked a new editor: Australian-born TIME Senior Editor Edwin Bolwell, a former New York Timesman and Toronto Star managing editor. Murdoch has added a distinctive dark red banner across the top of the front page and banished ads from the first seven pages. Page six has been reserved for a mild stew of short, gossipy items--including last week's tongue-in-cheek rewrite of an Associated Press report that ten people in Argentina have been stung by --you guessed it--killer bees, and a copy of a telegram sent to Murdoch by Screw Magazine Publisher Al Goldstein asking why his is "the only New York publication you haven't tried to buy? P.S. I have feelings too." This week Murdoch will add two pages of features and plans eventually to strengthen coverage of fashion, business, television and sports--especially horse racing. He intends to weed out the paper's overgrown garden of columnists, perhaps adding another conservative. "We're aiming for a fairly sophisticated afternoon paper," he says. "It's very middle class now, and we don't intend to change that."

Nor does Murdoch plan any earthquakes at New York, except naming James Brady, a former Women's Wear Daily captain and uninspired New York gossip columnist, as editor. "I would keep its politics, although I might run fewer pieces and longer ones. I'm beginning to tire of all this pop psychology though. It doesn't have much to do with New York as an upper-middle-class service magazine." Murdoch plans to reverse Felker's transformation of the Village Voice over the past couple of years from a gritty neighborhood weekly to more of a faddish entertainment guide. "It's got away from politics," Murdoch complains. "It's gone too much into life-styles." As for Felker's infant New West, "It's superb. I would not want to change anything." Murdoch promises that he will not try to edit any of the Felker publications himself. Says he: "The Post is enough."

Is it? Murdoch says he is finished shopping for new ventures and plans to settle in at New York and the Post. But it is hardly Murdoch's style to gather moss. He muses: "I've seized most of the opportunities, but I think about my failure to seize some."

What else makes Rupert run? Some associates believe he is driven by a need to better the accomplishments of his famous father. Others say Murdoch's ambition is to overcome his resentment at being forever considered an outsider--at Geelong Grammar, at Oxford, in Sydney, on Fleet Street. Up to a point, Murdoch agrees: "New York welcomes newcomers. In England, if one is an outsider there is suspicion." Still other Murdoch-watchers explain that the inveterate gambler is merely playing two-up with bigger stakes these days. Too bloody right, admits Murdoch: "Publishing is a life of constant calculated risks. That's also what gambling is."

Those theories may be a bit too facile to sum up the complicated man who can, at the same time, publish a quality national daily like The Australian and an ignoble fish wrapper like the San Antonio News, who can shake the spires of New York publishing and yet worry about wrinkling his necktie. Perhaps Murdoch has built his empire for the sheer fun of it. "It's a pretty heady life," he says. "There you are rubbing shoulders with Cabinet ministers, heads of big businesses, people who are involved in the arts. I love it. Who wouldn't?"

Or perhaps hidden in some family vault near Melbourne, where a young boy of ten once frolicked in unburdened bliss, there is a rusty sled emblazoned with the word ... no, wait. It never snows in Melbourne, and Murdoch is no self-destructive Citizen Kane. America's newest press lord has only just discovered a whole nation of newspapers he does not own. Yet.

*"Digger" is a slang term first used in the 1850s to describe a miner in the Australian gold fields. It was popular in World War I as a nickname for an Australian soldier, and today is sometimes employed as a generic name for any Australian.

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