SUNDAY, MAY 29 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C9
obituariesBY HARRISON SMITHThomas Murphy, a farsighted
executive who built Capital Cities
Communications into a media
juggernaut, shocking the business
world when he engineered the
$3.5 billion acquisition of ABC in
1985 and then oversaw his compa-
ny’s blockbuster merger with Dis-
ney a decade later, died May 25 at
his home in Rye, N.Y. He was 96.
His death was announced in a
statement by Walt Disney Compa-
ny, which did not cite a cause.
A Harvard Business School
graduate with a low-key personal-
ity and methodical approach to
business, Mr. Murphy helped re-
shape the national broadcasting
and entertainment landscape in
the late 20th century, growing
Capital Cities from a floundering
television station in Albany, N.Y.,
into a Wall Street darling that
controlled dozens of radio, televi-
sion and publishing properties.
Judging by stock price alone,
his leadership was phenomenally
successful. Between 1957, when
Capital Cities went public, and
1995, when Mr. Murphy arranged
the merger with Disney for $19
billion, shareholders saw their in-
vestment increase in value 2,000
times. But beyond his efforts to
improve the bottom line, he was
also admired for building a corpo-
rate culture that emphasized ethi-
cal behavior and for philanthropic
work that included leading the
humanitarian group Save the
Children for seven years as board
chairman.
“Tom Murphy was unrivaled in
our industry, not just for his busi-
ness achievements, but for his im-
peccable ethics, his unwavering
kindness and his boundless gen-
erosity,” former ABC president
and Disney chief executive Bob
Iger said in a statement. “He was a
deeply principled man, setting
and demanding high standards,
always living up to them, and
never compromising ethics in the
service of business.”
Mr. Murphy had a long history
of aggressive takeovers before his
company bought ABC, setting
what was then a record for the
biggest corporate acquisition out-
side the oil industry. Yet even with
his track record, the purchase
came as a shock to analysts and
investors, since ABC was about
four times larger than Capital Cit-
ies. One writer likened the pur-
chase to a minnow swallowing a
whale.
Wall Street cheered the trans-
action, in part because of the lean
management style at Capital Cit-
ies — Mr. Murphy had no legal
department or personnel office
and his secretary ran public rela-
tions — and because of the in-
volvement of his friend Warren
Buffett, the “Oracle of Omaha”
who helped finance the deal and
soon joined the board.
According to “Buffett: The
Making of an American Capital-
ist” by Roger Lowenstein, Mr.
Murphy started negotiating the
deal in late 1984, when he visited
the office of ABC chief Leonard
Goldenson. “Leonard,” he said, “I
don’t want you to throw me out of
the 39th floor, but I have an idea.”
Instead of tossing him onto the
streets of Manhattan, Goldenson
approved of the proposed acquisi-
tion, trusting Mr. Murphy to keep
ABC intact at a time when the
network was running third in the
ratings and attracting the atten-
tion of potential buyers who, like
Mr. Murphy, believed they could
streamline the network and re-
store it to dominance.
The deal was strengthened af-
ter Buffett agreed to be the “900-
pound gorilla” of the deal, as he
put it, investing more than half a
billion dollars in the company and
refusing to sell his stake after the
merger, as part of an effort to
prevent Capital Cities and ABC
from being snatched up by other
conglomerates.
In part, the investment was a
symbol that Buffett trusted Mr.
Murphy, whom he had once bond-
ed with over racquetball and a
steak dinner. “He has none of
those complexities of character
that screw other people up and
make for irrational behavior,” Buf-
fett said in a 1987 interview with
the New York Times. Indeed, in a
statement Wednesday, he said Mr.
Murphy “taught me more about
running a business than any other
person.”
Mr. Murphy went on to lead
Capital Cities and ABC as chair-
man and chief executive, aided by
his longtime lieutenant Daniel
Burke, whom he described as an
equal partner in the company.
Both men employed a hands-off
approach, emphasizing cost con-
trols while trying to empower
managers at a sprawling company
that included the fledgling cable
channel ESPN and publications
such as the Kansas City Star, Fort
Worth Star Telegram and Wom-
en’s Wear Daily. “How many fewer
people do you need to do your job,”
they would ask, “and what proj-
ects can you postpone?”
Some ABC journalists feared
their managerial approach would
devastate programs such as“World News Tonight,” “Night-
line” and “20/20.” But Mr. Murphy
was generally praised for his stew-
ardship of the news division. After
the company was sold, journalist
Cokie Roberts called him a
“world-class boss” and by all ac-
counts, he avoided interfering in
editorial decisions.
Mr. Murphy retired as chief ex-
ecutive in 1990, when he turned
65, but returned to the job in 1994
after Burke retired as his succes-
sor. A year later, he negotiated
with Disney chief executive Mi-
chael Eisner to create what was
then considered the most power-
ful entertainment company in the
world, uniting Capital Cities and
ABC properties with Disney assets
that included theme parks, movie
and television studios, and a sta-
ble of legendary cartoon charac-
ters.
The deal was reported to be the
second-largest corporate takeover
in history, after the 1989 buyout of
RJR Nabisco for $25 billion, and
came during a period of growing
consolidation in the entertain-
ment business, as new federal reg-
ulations freed the networks to
own a financial interest in shows
they broadcast. Just one day after
the sale was announced, Westing-
house Electric said it had agreed
to buy CBS for $5.4 billion.
By all accounts, the Disney deal
was arranged quickly following an
impromptu conversation with
Eisner, Buffett and Mr. Murphy at
a media conference in Sun Valley,
Idaho. It was a career capstone for
Mr. Murphy, who later served on
the board of Disney and of Buf-
fett’s holding company, Berkshire
Hathaway, while heading into re-
tirement.“I’m very happy we made the
deal. Unfortunately, I’m going to
be unemployed,” he joked in a
1995 interview with Broadcasting
& Cable, a trade publication. “You
know what my plan is? I’m going
to become a character actor at
Disney.”
Thomas Sawyer Murphy was
born in Brooklyn on May 31, 1925.
His father, a lawyer, was active in
Democratic politics and became a
justice of the state Supreme Court.
His mother was a homemaker
whose optimism and devout Ca-
tholicism were strong influences
on a young Tom Murphy, who later
had his corporate headquarters in
a building opposite St. Patrick’s
Cathedral in Manhattan.
Mr. Murphy served in the Navy
during World War II and graduat-
ed from Cornell University with a
mechanical engineering degree in- Four years later, he received
his MBA from Harvard.
After jobs as an industrial oil
salesman and ad agency execu-
tive, he landed at Lever Brothers
as a brand manager, only to leave
in 1954 to become a station man-
ager at Hudson Valley Broadcast-
ing, the Albany business that be-
came Capital Cities.
The media company was ini-
tially owned by an investment
group that included globe-trot-
ting radio broadcaster Lowell
Thomas and lost money for its
first few years, leading Mr. Mur-
phy to develop an appreciation for
cost controls. He became presi-
dent and then chairman in the
1960s, after spearheading many
early acquisitions by the company.
“I always had on my desk a
sheet of the people I would like to
make deals with,” he recalled. “I
went and saw them all. That is
how we built the company.”
Mr. Murphy was later appoint-
ed to the boards of IBM, Johnson
& Johnson and Texaco, and he was
president and chairman of the
Madison Square Boys & Girls Club
in New York City. He was also a
board trustee for five decades and
chairman for seven of those years
of what is now Langone Health at
New York University.
In 1955, he married Suzanne
Crosby, who had worked in Wash-
ington as a secretary to the charis-
matic Catholic leader Fulton
Sheen, often described as the first
televangelist. She died in 2009.
Survivors include four children,
Emilie Murphy of Rye, Thomas
Murphy Jr. of Greenwich, Conn.,
Kathleen Murphy of Boulder, Col.,
Mary Conlin of Los Angeles and
nine grandchildren.
During his years at the head of
Capital Cities and ABC, Mr. Mur-
phy gave an annual talk about
corporate philosophy, in effect
distilling his own approach to
business, including his belief that
a company had an obligation to its
audience, not just its sharehold-
ers.
“The way I was brought up in
the business, the first thing we
discussed when we went to the
office every day was whether what
we were doing was living up to our
responsibilities as a broadcaster
to our community,” he told Broad-
casting & Cable. “And then, after
you figured out that you were
doing everything you should in
that area, you paid attention
about what you could do to knock
the brains out of the competition,
which is what most people do
most of the time.”THOMAS M URPHY, 96
Executive led historic merger that united ABC, Disney
BEBETO MATTHEWS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Thomas Murphy, above as chairman and chief executive of Capital Cities and ABC at a shareholder meeting in 1996, oversaw the merger that brought together ABC and
Disney, in one of the largest corporate takeovers in history. He was admired for his business instincts and for building a corporate culture that placed an emphasis on ethics.BY ASSOCIATED PRESSMeda Mladkova, a Czech art
collector, patron and historian
who was an impassioned pro-
moter of Frantisek Kupka and
supported artists in communist
Czechoslovakia while she was in
exile outside the Iron Curtain,
died May 3 in Prague. She was
102.
The Kampa Museum, a mod-
ern art gallery that Mrs. Mladko-
va created in the heart of Prague,
announced the death but did not
give further details. “All her life
she believed in the idea: ‘If
culture survives, the nation will
survive,’ ” said Jiri Pospisil, the
chairman of the museum’s board.
Mrs. Mladkova was born Ma-
rie Magdalena Frantiska Sokolo-
va in what was Zakupy, Czecho-
slovakia (now the Czech Repub-
lic), on Sept. 8, 1919. She was
studying political science in Ge-
neva in 1948 when the commu-
nists took over Czechoslovakia.
She refused to return and moved
to Paris instead after her gradua-
tion.
She met her husband-to-be,
exiled Czech banker Jan Mladek,
in the French capital and studied
art at the Sorbonne. There, too,
she fell in love with the work of
Kupka (1871-1957), a Czech-born
pioneer of abstract art, who was
then a largely unknown painter.
She befriended Kupka, whose
early 20th-century works
“Fugue” and “Warm Chromatics”
are now considered to be the first
two entirely abstract paintings.
When Kupka was dying of
cancer in 1957 — still struggling
for artistic recognition — Mrs.
Mladkova wanted to make him
happy and told him she would
arrange “a big exhibition” of his
works. After she and her hus-
band moved to the United States
in 1960, she helped organize a
Kupka retrospective at New
York’s Guggenheim Museum in
1975 that triggered major interestin the artist.
To afford to buy two of Kupka’s
increasingly expensive oils, Mrs.
Mladkova and her husband (an
official with the International
Monetary Fund) had to sell their
house in Washington for
$950,000. Their efforts of many
years have resulted in a collec-
tion of pencil studies, watercol-
ors, color pastels and oils reflect-
ing the development of Kupka’s
art from his student days to his
late abstract pieces.
In the meantime, Mrs. Mlad -
kova traveled on a regular basis
to her homeland after 1967, pur-
chasing art pieces by artists who
were banned by the totalitarian
communist regime. Following
the death of her husband in 1989
and the fall of communism, she
decided to move her collection of
Kupka’s works to Prague.
In the Czech capital, Mrs.
Mladkova opened the Museum
Kampa, a complex of meticulous-
ly renovated historical buildingsMEDA MLADKOVA, 102
Czech art patron and historian w ho
created Prague’s Museum Kampa
on Kampa island near Prague’s
Charles Bridge. It houses a valu-
able collection of 215 works by
Kupka, who has become one the
country’s most celebrated paint-
ers.The museum also displays
sculptures by Czech cubist artist
Otto Gutfreund and a collection
of modern Central and Eastern
European art.
In 1999, Mrs. Mladkova wasawarded a state decoration by
President Vaclav Havel.
Mrs. Mladkova, who has no
immediate survivors, had donat-
ed her art collections to the city
of Prague.NGUYEN PHUONG THAO/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Meda Mladkova is seen in 2003 at the Museum Kampa, the gallery she opened in Prague t hat houses
215 drawings and paintings by a bstract art pioneer Frantisek Kupka and w orks of other Czech artists.“He has none ofthose complexitiesof character thatscrew other peopleup and make forirrational behavior.”
Warren Buffett,
in comments to the New York Times
on the personality of Thomas Murphy