As dessert was served Bluhdorn rose to speak. His voice was high-pitched and rasping, something between quacking and an angry bark, and his way of encouraging the troops was to single them out one at a time to be “roasted” with fierce humor. It was, in fact, an amazing sight: thirty or so middle-aged men in blue suits (there were almost no women present), nervous smiles fixed on their faces, waiting to see who Bluhdorn would pounce on next. They didn’t even know what to pray for—the natural thing was to pray that he would skip over you, but then again, being skipped over might mean that he didn’t care about you because he’d already decided to fire you. Michael Burke sat through this remarkable performance with stony indifference—Bluhdorn apparently knew better than to give Burke the treatment—then, clearly bored with the proceedings, he took the ribbon off his gift package and peeked inside. A smile came over his face, as he pulled out of the box a pair of one-size-fits-all stretch black gloves—Bluhdorn had bought a clothing company that manufactured them. Burke pulled them on, then held up one black-gloved hand. A deadly silence fell over the room, and Bluhdorn, momentarily silenced, stared at Michael Burke suspiciously. “Yes?” he asked. “You have a question?” Burke nodded cheerfully. “I just wanted to know which one of these guys I’m supposed to strangle,” he said.
Nobody laughed harder than Bluhdorn, but although the big teeth were clenched in a grin, there was nothing humorous about the way he looked at Burke. Right then and there I decided that Charles G. Bluhdorn was not a man to cross.
BLUHDORN’S LIFE was not exactly an open book, and the few facts tended to contradict each other, even in his “official” biographies, but it seems certain that he was born in Vienna, in 1926, of middle-class Czech parents. Whether or not he was Jewish was a question that was often asked, but never answered. The fact that his family moved from Austria to England in 1936, and that Bluhdorn was relocated to the United States as a refugee in 1942 certainly makes it seem likely that he was—not to speak of the fact that his speech, rapid, staccato, and sputtering as it was, was laden with colloquial Yiddish insults like putz, schmuck, and nebbish. Still, a lot of New Yorkers affect a familiarity with Yiddish, if only to make themselves sound like tough guys. All one can say is that Bluhdorn seemed to tread a careful line on the subject, allowing some people to believe he was Jewish, and others not.
His business career was in the Horatio Alger tradition. Having arrived in New York as a refugee, he went to work for a cotton broker at a salary of fifteen dollars a week, then switched to the commodities import/export business—a lifelong preoccupation with Bluhdorn, who bought and sold sugar futures the way other men play golf. By the time he was twenty-one, Bluhdorn had cornered the market in malt—his trading in that substance was, in fact, so hyperactive that it attracted the attention of the U.S. government, and brought about his first brush with Washington, though by no means the last. At twenty-three he was in business for himself, already a millionaire and something of a legend, but while he traded in almost everything from lard to pasta, he dreamed of something more stable, of an empire.
Bluhdorn’s epiphany—his equivalent of Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus—came in 1957, when he bought Michigan Bumper, a decrepit manufacturer of stamped replacement bumpers. It was not just that he saw his future in a more solid business than commodities, with their notorious fluctuations, nor even that he believed (wrongly) that the automobile spare parts business was the wave of the future and would survive every vicissitude of the economy—it was that with the purchase of Michigan Bumper he worked out the simple formula that would take him far beyond malt, lard, sugar, and bumpers into the financial stratosphere.
Michigan Bumper was an unglamorous, low-rent, rust-belt corporation, whose stock (and industrial expertise) was at the bottom of the barrel, but once Bluhdorn owned it, it did not take him long to discover that bankers were happy to lend him money to acquire another corporation. However decrepit Michigan Bumper might be, it existed—unlike most commodity deals. Somewhere in the wasteland of the industrial Midwest there was a real-life, Dickensian factory, belching smoke and turning out replacement bumpers for 1948 Fords and Chevrolets for sale to people who couldn’t afford factory parts. Bankers, Bluhdorn discovered, love bricks and mortar, and in no time he was able to merge his new acquisition with Beard & Stone Electric Co., of Houston, another unglamorous manufacturer of replacement auto parts.
Since Houston is near the Gulf of Mexico and Michigan is in the Midwest, some clever soul came up with the idea of calling the merged corporations the Gulf & Western Industries (the idea of replacing the ampersand with a plus sign was to come later, as a symbol of the synergy that Bluhdorn sought, but never achieved, the idea being that the whole of the company was worth more than the sum of its parts).
From these grimy and humble beginnings, Bluhdorn set out on a bank-financed spending spree in 1960.
Each acquisition opened up possibilities for another; each acquisition financed the next. It was a recipe for rapid growth, and while it dazzled investors, it failed to enchant Wall Street, where Bluhdorn was regarded with deep skepticism, partly because of the helter-skelter nature of his acquisitions, partly because Bluhdorn himself never inspired the confidence of major Wall Street figures. There was something about him that set their teeth on edge, a demonic energy, a quality of bluster, a habit of superheated exaggeration and crazed enthusiasm—a simple inability, perhaps, to shut up and stop talking. He remained an outsider and a renegade, and resented the fact bitterly.
In 1966, however, Bluhdorn’s fortunes took a turn for the better that was to turn him, from Wall Street’s point of view—and perhaps the rest of the world’s—from a frog into a prince. Paramount Pictures had been declining for years, its famous name weighted down with expensive failed pictures and a board of directors that consisted of timid old men. Although Adolph Zukor, the founder of Paramount, was still alive, approaching his centenary, and although the studio had once been Hollywood’s greatest, the company had slipped far behind its rivals and was in danger of disintegrating. Always quick to recognize a company in distress, Bluhdorn snapped Paramount up.
There are a lot of reasons why wealthy businessmen choose to go into the movie business. One of them is that it can be enormously profitable (of course it is also possible to lose your shirt, as Joseph P. Kennedy and Kirk Kerkorian discovered); a more potent reason is social. By the 1960s Bluhdorn was a rich man, but how many people want to invite the owner of New Jersey Zinc to dinner parties, and how many attractive women want to hear about the automobile spare parts business from the man sitting beside them at the dinner table? Money is not everything, as Bluhdorn—like Marvin Davis and Rupert Murdoch, after him—discovered.
The purchase of Paramount transformed Bluhdorn overnight, however, as he must have guessed it would, from a megalomaniacal acquirer of rather dull companies, most of them on the verge of collapse, into a figure of mystery and power, a financier straight out of a Harold Robbins novel. The owner of a major studio is welcome everywhere; attractive women who aren’t even slightly interested in the zinc business are as breathlessly fascinated by movie gossip as anyone else (or, if they’re very beautiful, may even be looking for a way into the movie business). Bluhdorn suddenly became a glamorous person, rather than being merely rich.
What is more, despite the suspicion and hostility Bluhdorn’s acquisition of Paramount caused in Hollywood, where it is an axiom that no outsider can understand the movie business or succeed at it, he was, in fact, made for the movie business, and it for him. To begin with, he loved taking risks; then too, although he constantly challenged and fought with the people around him, he recognized talent when he saw it, and was willing to back it—more, much more, than can be said of the proprietors of most movie studios. That he was a monumental pain in the ass, a full-time kibitzer, a tyrant, and totally involved in the process almost goes without saying, but these are just the qualities that are lacking in most studios, and that the old studio heads—Louis B. Mayer
, Harry Cohn, Darryl F. Zanuck, and Jack Warner, to name a few—had in superabundance.
Bluhdorn’s impatience, his histrionics, his boasting, his kinetic hyperactivity, and monumental chutzpah—in brief, all the things that made him a distrusted figure on Wall Street and in the financial press—were assets in Tinseltown. It was sheer chutzpah to pick Robert Evans, then best known as a smooth and handsome young suit-and-cloaker who became an actor and Hollywood man-about-town, to be Paramount’s version of Irving Thalberg, a move that confounded everybody in the industry, including Evans himself, but with his usual shrewdness, Bluhdorn made sure that Evans was surrounded by tough businessmen with good heads for numbers, like Martin S. Davis. The mixture was enormously successful: Paramount’s run of box office disasters was replaced by pictures like Catch-22, The Godfather, and Love Story. Bluhdorn’s talent for knocking people’s heads together and persuading them to do what they didn’t want to do was a godsend for Paramount, whether it was getting a reluctant Walter Matthau to star in the movie of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple or talking Irving Lazar into accepting an offer for the screen rights to Funny Girl. Profane, tireless, crackling with nervous energy, it was as if Bluhdorn always got what he wanted, and since success breeds success, it was soon the case.
He loved Hollywood, and the glamour that went with it, the private jet whisking him off to L.A., the discreet bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the atmosphere of luxurious decadence combined with hard-headed deal-making and unbridled competition, the opportunity to spar with egos that were even bigger than his own. These were the late sixties, too, before the fear of AIDS and the abuse of cocaine took their toll of people’s private lives in Beverly Hills and Bel Air. It was the time of Hugh Hefner’s West Coast Playboy mansion, of nonstop partying at the home of disgraced financier Bernie Cornfeld, of parties at Bob Evans’s home where there were always beautiful girls, dozens of them, some of them swimming tirelessly back and forth in the floodlit pool, hour after hour, just to give the guests something to look at. Whatever else Bluhdorn got out of his acquisition of Paramount, one of them was a reputation as a man who liked women, and expected to be provided with them—no big deal in the movie business, which has always been run in the spirit of a sultan’s harem.
Stories were told about Bluhdorn’s blossoming into a full-blown man of the world, one of them being that when Bluhdorn swept into the Plaza Hotel on his way to the Oak Room (then his favorite place for lunch, before he started using his own dining room at the top of the G+W tower), followed by his entourage, he saw a very beautiful young woman sitting on a taboret, and gave her the once-over. Turning to one of his PR men, he told him to invite the woman to lunch, then swept on.
A few minutes later, the PR man returned from his mission empty-handed. It wasn’t his fault, he explained—she was waiting, in fact, for her husband, so there was no way he could have persuaded her to accept the invitation. Bluhdorn ignored the man and glanced at the table setting in front of where the PR man was to sit. “Take all that away,” Bluhdorn told the maître d’. “He won’t be eating with us.”
Stories of abrupt dismissals like this were rife, but most of the people at the core of G+W were fanatically loyal to Bluhdorn and he to them. Once he had decided that you were “my boy” or “a genius” or both, he was endlessly supportive, though you had to be able to withstand his ferocious attempts to persuade you to accept his point of view. In truth, the quickest way to gain his respect was to disagree with him, if you had your facts right and were willing to stick up for them. “Goddamn Snyder,” he once said, speaking affectionately of the head of S&S, “he never agrees with me!”
On occasions, it sometimes seemed as if G+W really was the heartless and monstrous mega-conglomerate trying to take over the studio in Mel Brooks’s Silent Movie, in which the corporate motto was “Engulf and devour,” and the inscription chiseled into the marble wall of the corporate bathroom read, “Our bathrooms are nicer than other people’s homes.” I remember a whole day spent in the Paramount movie theater (apparently sited below the G+W tower so that you could hear the rumble of the subway trains, by the same architect who put the sway into the building) in which each division’s numbers were projected onto a screen, while the head of the division was spotlit in his seat so that Bluhdorn could praise or excoriate him, as the case might be, and another, at a time when he was incensed by a series of muckraking articles about G+W in The New York Times, written by Seymour Hersh, when Bluhdorn tore a copy of the Times into pieces and flung them out at the audience of G+W executives, the climax of a speech of self-justification so violent, frenzied, and incoherent that everybody was in a state of shock by the end of it.
That was the public man, of course, who rather cherished his reputation for tantrums and high drama. At closer range, he could be far more subtle.
I WAS drawn into Bluhdorn’s circle of interest when in 1980 I published The Fifth Horseman, a novel by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre that foretold a terrorist attack on New York City by Palestinians using a smuggled atomic bomb. Collins and Lapierre were journalists, graduates of Newsweek and Paris-Match, respectively, and they therefore managed to give the book a certain scary realism. I do not know whether he had actually read The Fifth Horseman, but something in the book sparked him off in the spirit of Paul Revere. Over and over, with mounting passion, he held up meetings by explaining to startled and terrified financial managers how New York City could be blown to pieces—all of it, even the G+W tower, for chrissakes—by terrorists, and (his voice rising in pitch like an air-raid siren) NOBODY IN AUTHORITY WOULD LISTEN, NOBODY WAS PREPARED, NOBODY WAS TAKING THIS SERIOUSLY! It could be happening, he cried, at this very minute!
The only way to make people aware of the danger, Bluhdorn finally decided, was to make The Fifth Horseman into a movie, a big movie, which he figured would be a huge international box-office hit. It became his mission to get the movie made.
Unfortunately, there was one obstacle, even after Bluhdorn had managed to buy the rights from the authors’ agent, Irving Lazar: Barry Diller, who was then running Paramount (and doing a brilliant job of it), didn’t want to make it. Bluhdorn never stopped arguing with Diller about The Fifth Horseman (and the more Bluhdorn argued, the more Diller dug his heels in), but he would not, under any circumstances, order Diller to make the picture. Whenever things got out of hand, Diller, whose ability to handle his mercurial boss smoothly was legendary, would simply remind Bluhdorn that all he had to do was send a memo ordering him to make The Fifth Horseman and sign it. The picture would then be made.
But of course that was the one thing Bluhdorn couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do. He believed in delegating authority. Besides, if the project failed, he wanted to be able to say to Diller that it was his decision, not Bluhdorn’s, that if he wasn’t man enough to stand up to Bluhdorn, he wasn’t man enough to run the studio. Diller was secure in the knowledge that however much Bluhdorn might rant and rave at him, his boss would never send that memo. The only people who didn’t understand that were the authors, who assumed that when Bluhdorn wanted something done, it happened.
As the editor of the book, I was dragged into this imbroglio because of my knowledge of the story—I was, after all, the one person who could be certified as having actually read the book, unlike Lazar, who didn’t even pretend to have read it. * Thus, I was summoned one Saturday to Bluhdorn’s country home for a “story conference,” the purpose of which, I soon discovered, was to persuade Milos Forman to sign on as the director of The Fifth Horseman. Bluhdorn figured that if he could get a treatment, a director of real stature, and a couple of stars committed to the project, Diller would find it harder to say no.
Bluhdorn’s country home was vast, rambling, and handsomely landscaped, but its most notable feature was a parking lot big enough for a good-size motel. Bluhdorn’s car and driver, Forman’s car and driver, and the car and driver that had been provided for me were drawn up in it as I was conducted to the pool house, where Forman, casually dr
essed, and Bluhdorn, in the kind of matching short-sleeved pool shirt and shorts that men used to wear poolside in Miami Beach hotels in the 1950s, were sitting under an awning, lighting up cigars.
The pool itself was huge, glamorous, and empty. As I sat down, I remarked politely on what a nice pool it was.
Bluhdorn seemed startled. “Pool? What goddamn pool?” he asked. “We’re not here to swim, goddamn it,” he barked. “We’re here to talk about the goddamn Fifth Horseman.”
Having put me in my place, Bluhdorn gave Forman, who had probably heard it a dozen times before, his set piece on the dangers facing New York and the need to wake the country up—the whole goddamn world, in fact. Forman nodded at appropriate moments, his eyes half closed. He did not attempt to interrupt Bluhdorn, not so much out of deference but because Bluhdorn never seemed to pause for breath. Bluhdorn was the only man I had ever met who could talk while he was inhaling. Occasionally he stuffed his cigar in his mouth, but that didn’t slow him down either.
Eventually, he finished, lit another cigar, and asked Forman to comment. Wearily, Forman proceeded to explain the many difficulties of turning The Fifth Horseman into a movie. He shared Bluhdorn’s enthusiasm, of course, he said, with an expression so devoid of enthusiasm as to appear almost blank, but the ending was weak, a real letdown. The cop who is the good guy finds the bomb at the last moment and defuses it. It’s predictable, Forman said.
Bluhdorn nodded. This was apparently not the first time he’d heard this criticism of his baby. He pointed his cigar at me, “What do you say to that?” he asked, as if the ending were my fault.
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