The official story will be that Jon Miller, the new broom from AOL, has swept aside MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and his team. But as always, Murdoch alone rules News Corp. And the decision must have been his.

Murdoch's wife, Wendi Deng, is the chair of MySpace China, and that professional relationship has spurred dangerous gossip which can't have helped DeWolfe's standing.

Four years after he bought MySpace, Murdoch has finally rid MySpace of the spammers and scammers who launched it. It is far past time — and yet probably the right moment. Wall Street Journal reporter Julia Angwin's book, Stealing MySpace, has exposed MySpace's roots in porn, spam, and hacking. As the economic tide that boosted MySpace's advertising sales has receded, DeWolfe has been shown to be swimming naked. And Miller, as News Corp.'s newest Internet executive and the latest to have won Murdoch's ear, is in prime position to push out DeWolfe, whose contract expires this fall. (Just one question: If DeWolfe sidekick Tom Anderson is ousted, who will become every MySpace user's default first friend?)

DeWolfe always seemed more interested in throwing parties and dating celebrities than solving MySpace's hard problems. Growth has stagnated for the past year as Facebook has surged. The site's interface remains a shambolic wreck which fails at the most basic tasks, like remembering a user's login. Talented engineers, including COO Amit Kapur, have defected. Slingshot Labs, a MySpace spinoff meant to foster Silicon Valley-style innovation, is an industry laughingstock for launching a me-too celebrity gossip site rather than chasing genuinely new technologies. Given all this, it's possible that DeWolfe's friendship with Deng was the only thing that helped him last so long.

What now for the site? News Corp. is reportedly recruiting a new CEO already. Former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta would be an excellent choice, if he can be wrested away from the music startup he's currently running. Or the company might place an internal candidate from the News Corp. empire, to provide the closer eye MySpace has long needed.

Ah, but those are tiresomely sensible choices. Here are two that would maximize the Murdoch family drama everyone loves: Install prodigal son Lachlan Murdoch. Or put Deng in charge.

Aside from her unofficial role as her husband's consigliere, Deng is the chief strategist of MySpace China. So it's hardly unusual for her to show up at the office. Indeed, since MySpace China's CEO abruptly quit last September and still hasn't been replaced amid ongoing boardroom drama, she might as well be running the show.

Yet MySpace China is more or less a failure, with less than 10 million users at last count, against rival Chinese services with more than 100 million users in the country.

Meanwhile, there is what looks like an ongoing smear campaign suggesting that MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and Deng, who both serve on MySpace China's board, had an affair — one that some claim is spread by Roger Ailes, a rival executive at News Corp. We have to wonder: If MySpace China had a business worth talking about, would anyone be dwelling on this rumor?

This insane theory, though, goes like this: the true target of the smear isn't Wendi at all, but rather Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson, and one of the rising golden boys of the News Corp. empire and therefore a threat to Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News. Thomson, whose life story is uncannily similar to Rupert's, also has a Chinese wife, Wang Ping, who happens to be friends with Wendi. Thus, the damaging suggestion about Thomson would be that Ping had aided and abetted Wendi in her dalliance. The only person who'd try to pull off such a crazy scheme? Naturally, News Corp.'s resident master of dark arts and head of Fox News, Roger Ailes. Which brings us full circle back to Wolff's book, which has supposedly caused a rift between Ailes and Murdoch because it, as the New York Times reported in October, "suggests that Mr. Murdoch is at times embarrassed by Fox News, which he owns, and its chief executive, Roger Ailes, and that he often shares 'the general liberal apoplexy,' as Mr. Wolff writes in the book, toward Fox News and its perceived conservative slant."

So there you have it. A crazy theory so crazy it could be true (but probably isn't!). I'm going to head off to Wolff's party now and see if I can dig up something actually substantial. If you know anything about who's behind the Wendi rumor, please email me.

The rumor itself is actually at least 18 months old — we first heard it last year after a reporter at a major business magazine got the News Corp. nuclear treatment when he rang up the flacks to ask whether they had made out at a party — largely spurred by Deng being named the "chief of strategy" at MySpace China last summer, putting her in close (business) contact with DeWolfe. And then there were reports that DeWolfe was using his friendship with Deng in his negotiations for a new compensation package with News Corp.

The first time in the most recent spate of tips was in the form of an an email from someone using the Dark Knight pseudonym "Harvey Dent" and was pre-written in gossip-columnese ("What media mogul billionaire’s wife has been guilty of so many sexual escapades that she is the talk of LA?"), but it also made some amateurish mistakes, such as referring to "Wendy Deng." The second tipster came from inside a media organization that's locked horns with News Corp. plenty of times in the past. The third was the most aggressive. Their first account was that they had heard that someone with a grudge against Murdoch had hired a private investigator who had discovered that Deng was involved with "Chris DeWitt." Asked why someone was digging dirt on Rupert, they said it was "more of a personal interest."

None of the new tipsters have offered any new evidence to made us think it's true. Like the Jossip item, all leaned heavily on the detail that they're hooking up at 141 Prince St. But that's hardly a secret address. since that's where the Murdochs live when they're in New York. And as someone familiar with the Murdochs points out, they sold that apartment in 2005 and now live on Fifth Ave. So color us skeptical. Though, of course, if you know more than our previous tipsters, we're interested in that, too.

Romance novelist Melanie Craft has been Mrs. Larry Ellison since December 2003.

Wendi Deng (that's 邓文迪 to you) isn't just Mrs. Rupert Murdoch. She's chief strategist for MySpace China.

(Photos by Patrick McMullen, WENN, Daniel Deme/WENN)

Apparently, Web developers, like vampires, shun warmth and sunlight. Unable to find enough talented engineers in L.A., MySpace has decided to open up more fogbound digs to tap San Francisco's pool of snooty, entitled, arrogant Webheads. Welcome to San Francisco, Rupe! You can't really claim to run an Internet company until you've been sneered at by a 23-year-old developer, so enjoy it. To celebrate the move, the company will throw a shindig next week at the Museum of Modern Art, right in time to attract the crowd attending the Web 2.0 Summit.

One lingering question: Will Chris DeWolfe, Rupert Murdoch, and Wendi Deng — wife of Murdoch and, as chairwoman of MySpace China, DeWolfe's colleague — all attend the party together? [Editor's note: Awkwaaarrrd!]