“Her closest friends don’t understand it any more than the rest of the world does,” said Robert Gottlieb, who as editor in chief of Knopf became Ms. Friedman’s mentor when she joined the imprint’s publicity team in 1968. “It’s a dreadful mistake. Jane rescued HarperCollins from decades of sleepiness and irrelevance. … What can be in the minds of these people, losing somebody that valuable, is simply beyond my comprehension.”
Editors and publishers in the HarperCollins building have spent the past week going over, in their minds and in conversation, the last interactions that they had with Ms. Friedman. Some remember the assuredness with which she’d run that Internet meeting on Wednesday morning. But many more keep coming back to her behavior at Book Expo, the massive publishing convention that had taken place in Los Angeles several days earlier. On the second night of the convention, an exuberant Ms. Friedman threw a party for HarperCollins on the Twentieth Century Fox Lot, smiling the whole way through, drinking margaritas and declaring to Pub Crawl at one point, apropos of nothing at all, “I love being CEO of HarperCollins!” She made sure the quote had been written down, and when I e-mailed her the link to the story on Wednesday afternoon and noted that her remark appeared near the end, she wrote back, “Very nice.” That was at 4 p.m., just a half hour before her meeting with Mr. Murdoch.
One wonders what Mr. Murray was doing at the time. As he told the papers on Thursday, Mr. Murdoch had called him into his office on Monday and surprised him with an offer to take over the job of CEO. This was fully two days before Ms. Friedman was informed that she was being replaced, and it m
eant that Mr. Murray, widely thought to be an heir apparent to the HarperCollins throne ever since he was given the title of General Book Group president and publisher in the spring of 2004, had known for at least 48 hours what lay ahead for Ms. Friedman, and had kept it to himself.
One person observed that Mr. Murray was not his usual ebullient self during those 48 hours, that he seemed distracted and tense. But colleagues are not begrudging him his silence. As one publisher at a different house who once had to keep mum about a colleague’s imminent firing put it, “Sometimes it’s unbelievably awkward and weird, but that’s what you do.”
What provoked Mr. Murdoch to call that final Wednesday meeting with Ms. Friedman remains a mystery. As several high-level employees at HarperCollins pointed out, if he was unhappy with Ms. Friedman’s performance on the job—or if, as some have suggested, he fired her for mishandling the Judith Regan situation back in December of 2006 and costing News Corp. millions as a result—then it makes little sense for him to have appointed a man whom she’s been openly grooming for the job.
As one source at the house put it, “The thing that still doesn’t add up to me is that the company’s performing well, and they’re essentially ratifying the succession. He’s the heir apparent that she handpicked. So they’re not saying they want to go in a different direction.”
From this train of thought springs fear that Mr. Murdoch is thinking about selling HarperCollins. These are old fears, of course, dating all the way back to the early 1990s, but recent rumblings out of Germany about informal talks between News Corp. and Random House’s parent company Bertelsmann AG have lent the scenario a renewed urgency. Though Mr. Murray, who has discussed the issue with Mr. Murdoch, has assured staff that the company is in no danger of being sold, many in the building still say that anything is possible—that because Mr. Murray is a skilled businessman with a knack for administrative strategy and little interest in the literary aspects of publishing, he might be well suited to tie the bow around the box if News Corp. ever puts its feelers out again.
Mr. Murray did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did Ms. Friedman, who told staff that she is taking the summer off and is said to be splitting her time between her home in Manhattan and her summer place in Amagansett.
lneyfakh@observer.com
