Despite Murdoch divorce, Wendi Deng won't have pie on her face

The fabled marriage of Wendi Deng and Rupert Murdoch’s has come to an unexpected end with Murdoch filing for divorce today. Murdoch was the billionaire chairman and CEO of News Corp, Deng was fiercely ambitious, beautiful and nearly 4 decades younger. A daughter of a factory-worker in a small Chinese town, she moved to America, got a green card, went to Yale and became immensely successful. Then she married Murdoch, and got consigned to that age old category defined by derision, curiosity and some envy – a gold-digger. [caption id=“attachment_871501” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Murdoch and Wendi Deng in happier times. AP image[/caption] But it was a pie that changed Deng’s image. In 2011, Deng, dressed in a pink blazer, was sitting attentively next to her subdued husband at a difficult testimony before a UK parliamentary committee investigating the News of the world hacking scandal. A protestor got to his feet with a cream pie in his hand, ready to fling it at Murdoch. To embarrass him? Teach him a lesson? Gain notoriety? Whatever his reasons, Deng was having none of it. With lightning-fast reflexes, she jumped up out of her seat and gave the would-be pie-flinger a resounding slap. She flung the pie out of the way, and with whipped cream still dotting his bald head and blazer, she cradled Murdoch’s head and soothed him as she wiped him clean with her hand. The media went crazy. Deng went from harridan to heroine, from trophy wife to tiger wife. “Until the cream-pie incident, she’d really been branded as the classic younger wife with a tinge of racism and stereotyping,” said Andrew Butcher to The New York Times in a profile of Deng from 2012. “That really gave the marriage legitimacy.” In the same profile, Deng’s longtime friend Diane von Furstenberg, the designer, said that the moment epitomised Deng. “She is fierce and protective and not afraid of anything,” said von Furstenberg. Before Murdoch happened to Deng, her life read like a rags-to-riches immigrant story, though it involved making some dubious choices along the way. When in China as a young girl, she came in contact with Jake and Joyce Cherry, a young couple who were starting a refrigerator company in the country. Deng, whose name then was Deng Wenge, asked Joyce to teach her English. The couple sponsored her student visa, a move that Joyce probably later regretted. Deng had an affair with Jake, and married him just long enough to get a green card, after which they divorced. Deng, with an MBA from Yale in her hand, started working as an intern for Star Television in Hong Kong, a satellite network Murdoch had bought in 1993. A person present during their first meeting – at the Star offices – later recalled in an interview, “We were all asking Murdoch soft questions. Wendy stood up at the back and said, ‘Why is your China strategy so bad?’” Impressed by her blunt attitude, Murdoch made Deng his interpreter for his visit to China. They were married as soon as Murdoch finalised a divorce from his second wife. This divorce will probably not change much for Deng, who had stepped away from the functioning of News Corp over the last few years. She also said in an interview to The New York Times in 2012 that her husband and she had been living separate lives for a long time now. The exact reasons are unknown, but a tweet from the Business Editor of the BBC has raised many eyebrows.  Deng is an immensely successful woman in her own right, partly due to her impeccable networking skills and business sense. She is the CEO of a film company and serves on the board of advisers at the Yale School of Management, besides being in a social circle which includes Bono, Nicole Kidman and David Geffen. Deng’s prenuptial agreement with Murdoch remains a secret, but his second wife walked away with $1.7 billion, as well as $100 million in cash. But going by Deng’s acumen and street-smarts, divorce or not, she will definitely not end up with pie on her face.