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