The King of Content

by Keach Hagey

  But as the premiere approached, the task of drumming up interest in the drive-in fell to a far less known entity: Max Rothstein, a slight, soft-spoken Bostonian with piercing blue eyes, a long face, and a thick sweep of hair that made him look not unlike a movie star himself. Rothstein was the public face of Sunrise Auto Theatre, Inc., a hastily assembled, Boston-based corporation founded earlier that summer, just as the Long Island zoning officials had decided to approve the creation of a drive-in. On July 3, Chanin announced that he had leased the $50,000 theater “for the long term,” according to the New York Times, to Sunrise, which would operate it. It was quite a coup for a thirty-six-year-old father of two who had neither the money to lease a drive-in nor any experience running one. Nowhere in all the press reports was there any word about how Rothstein came into that money. Not until years later would it emerge that he had a silent partner: Harry “Doc” Sagansky, a Boston dentist-turned-bookie, who at that point was five years into his career as one of the most famous illegal gambling figures of the twentieth century.

  “They were partners together for forty-four years,” said Sagansky’s son Robert Sage. “My father helped put money into the theaters, starting with the Sunrise.”

  But for obvious reasons, Sagansky remained in the background, and so it was left to Rothstein to be the barker. While Chanin, a developer to the core, went for superlatives and grandeur, Rothstein emphasized drive-ins’ practicality and accessibility. Drive-ins mainly served the “family trade,” Rothstein told the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, with a high concentration of what the paper called “cripples and aged people who are not able to walk into ordinary theaters but who can be brought to the automobile theaters.”4 The Boston-area theaters were particularly popular, Rothstein noted, because they took cars off the street and reduced traffic congestion—a somewhat peculiar pitch for a drive-in located along one of the earliest tentacles of Long Island’s suburban sprawl. Freedom to smoke and talk through the movie without annoying fellow audience members was, he said, another key advantage.

  If it seemed like Rothstein was doing everything humanly possible to erase any mental images of necking teens before they even had a chance to form, that’s because he was. He was well acquainted with the risks of doing otherwise. He pitched himself to the New York papers as an expert in drive-ins, having “been interested” in the operation of those that had popped up in suburban Boston in the last couple of years. But what he did not mention was that, less than a year before, suburban Boston had also been the site of one of the first and most ferocious community outcries over a proposed drive-in that the fledgling industry had seen. The previous October, 250 people had packed into the town hall building of Dedham, on the southwest edge of Boston, to protest a proposed drive-in at the intersection of the newly constructed Route 1 and Route 128. The chairman of the board of selectmen of Westwood, an adjoining community, said the proposed theater “would be a menace and a moral danger to the community.”5 The plans were nixed. (More than a decade later, Rothstein and Sagansky would open up a drive-in on the site, which has since become the luxurious Cinema De Lux multiplex at Legacy Place that serves as a centerpiece of Rothstein’s descendants’ theater chain.)

  The ad in the local papers for opening night summed up the pitch: “Sunrise Drive-In Theatre. The latest thing on Long Island. New, open-air way of seeing the movies. Sit in your own car. No parking problems, no waiting in line, dress as you please, smoke, chat, be comfortable. New show every Sunday, Wednesday & Saturday. 35 cents per person—your auto free. 8:30 and 10:30 nightly.”

  And then the all-important words: “Rain or shine.”6

  * * *

  By 1938, drive-ins were not quite as novel as Rothstein’s ad copy would suggest. The first one was opened just over the Camden, New Jersey, town line on June 6, 1933, by Richard Milton Hollingshead Jr. shortly after he received a patent for his design of terraced ramps that enabled cars to come and go without distracting their fellow moviegoers.

  Hollingshead, the son of an auto products dealer, originally concocted his outdoor movie theater as a mere feature of a more grandiose plan for a Hawaiian fantasy-themed gas station, complete with palm tree–shaped gas pumps, but for perhaps obvious reasons, only the outdoor movie innovation survived. At least a dozen drive-ins popped up over the next five years, but Hollingshead had little luck getting them to pay him license fees for his patent without suing them. Among those tangled up in early litigation were two in the Greater Boston area that had likely inspired Rothstein: the Weymouth Drive-In Theatre in Weymouth, Massachusetts, opened in 1936, and E. M. Loew’s Open Air Theatre in Lynn, Massachusetts, opened in 1937. By the spring of 1938, the trade publication BoxOffice wrote of the New England drive-in industry: “There are already more law suits on drive-in theatres in this territory than there are drive-in localities.”7

  Many years later, Rothstein’s son Sumner would claim that the Sunrise was “maybe” the third drive-in in the country. According to newspapers of the day and subsequent studies, it was probably closer to the fifteenth, with drive-ins in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, Massachusetts, California, and Ohio predating it.

  But what it lacked in novelty, it made up in size and style.

  * * *

  The Sunrise was the first truly grand suburban drive-in in the country, built for five hundred cars but expanded to accommodate two thousand, with a playground for children and even a Ferris wheel.8

  It was part of an ambitious suburban vision by Irwin Chanin and his brother Henry, who in 1936 purchased a 335-acre tract of empty land just beyond the New York City limits and carved it up into a unique “residential park” community of eighteen hundred Cape Cods, colonials, and English manor houses, mostly on cul-de-sacs connected by footpaths, called Green Acres. Both the development and the drive-in were harbingers of a new mode of American life as the country emerged from the Great Depression, one built around middle-class families with disposable income, roomy cars, and easy access to endless miles of freshly built highways. Drive-in theaters would expand modestly to about one hundred across the country by the start of World War II and then stop dead, halted by tire and gas rationing. But as soon as the war was over, they took off, exploding to more than two thousand by the 1950s. Foreseeing this boom, Rothstein told the papers that his company was named “Sunrise Auto Theatres,” suggesting there would soon be more of them, even though it was actually named Sunrise Auto Theatre, Inc., in corporate filings and land records.9 And though it took a decade for Rothstein and Sagansky to open their second theater, eventually their ambitions were realized. Despite what a New York Times reporter described as a “torrential downpour” and a still-primitive sound technology, the Sunrise’s opening night had been a success.10 The bad weather at the opening had proven that, as the Wave newspaper put it, “even with the windows of an automobile closed the roof of the car acts as a sounding board to bring inside the sound from the battery of directional amplifiers located atop the 80-foot-high screen. Under all conditions the quality of sight and sound are equal to those in the conventional indoor theatre.”11 The Sunrise Auto Theatre became the cornerstone of a chain of drive-in theaters that would come to dominate the Northeast and, by the end of the 1950s, remake itself with an even more forward-looking name: National Amusements Inc.

  Under the leadership of Rothstein’s son Sumner, who worked at the Sunrise selling popcorn and soda during his teenage years, National Amusements would go on to take control of Viacom Inc. and CBS Corp. and build one of the world’s largest media holdings.12 Along the way, it has shaped culture in immeasurable ways, defining global pop culture for generations and inventing the reality television format at MTV, giving platform to the leading satirical voices of the last two decades with South Park and The Daily Show, pioneering the very idea of a dedicated children’s channel with Nickelodeon, reviving the once-beleaguered CBS to a prime-time powerhouse with hits like Survivor and The Big Bang Theory, and showing Hollywood that critical acclaim and commercial success n
eed not be mutually exclusive with hit movies like Titanic, Forrest Gump, and Braveheart.

  It would turn Sumner Redstone into one of the richest men in the world, with a Beverly Hills mansion, girlfriends half his age, and a Rolodex of Hollywood royalty for dining companions. And ultimately, control of it would pass into the hands of Sumner’s daughter, Shari, and her children amid one of the greatest boardroom battles that corporate America has ever seen. But before any of that could happen, Max Rothstein would have to become Mickey Redstone.

  * * *

  Max Rohtstein was born on April 11, 1902, in Boston, the fifth of ten children raised by Morris and Rebecca Rohtstein, who were part of the great wave of Jewish immigrants fleeing rising anti-Semitism and desperate poverty in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Morris grew up the eldest son in a family of dark-haired, brown-eyed bakers in Kozova, a shtetl in a section of modern-day Ukraine known then as Galicia, the poorest province of the Austrian empire, just as the formation in the 1880s of Christian economic cooperatives designed to exclude Galician Jews from commercial life was prompting a mass emigration to the United States. In 1892, at the age of eighteen, he boarded the steamship Friesland from Antwerp, Belgium, bound for New York. There he joined his father, Isaac, who had arrived the previous year, and they made their way to Boston. Over the next two years, Morris’s little brothers, Harry—traveling alone at just eight years old—and Barnett, known as Barney, would join them. In a hint of family strife to come, each would go on to found his own bakery supply company, named after himself, just blocks away from each other in the working-class Boston neighborhoods of Charlestown and the West End: M. Rohtstein Co., H. Rohtstein & Co., and B. Rothstein & Co. (Barney had given in early to American bureaucrats’ tendency to flip the “h” and the “t” in public documents, while Morris’s family held out longer but eventually followed suit, with Max going by Rothstein by the time he was a teenager). Their descendants would run them for the better part of the next century, though the lack of family solidarity would baffle them a bit. “They were all competitors,” said Harry Rohtstein’s grandson, Steven Rohtstein, who remains in the flour and sugar distribution business in Massachusetts to this day. Although he was the straggler, only entering the flour supply business after a stint in antique dealing, Harry would end up the most successful of the brothers. By the mid-twentieth century, Harry Rohtstein & Co. would become one of the nation’s largest flour distributors.13

  But it was Morris’s branch that was bound for the true heights of American business. On March 14, 1894, Morris married Rebecca Bornstein, an eighteen-year-old “tailoress” from Vilnius, Lithuania, with brown, wavy hair, a wide smile, and an ample figure well-built for the rapid-fire baby production that was to come. Their first child, Sarah, arrived nine months later.

  Boston’s immigrant population was exploding, particularly from Southern and Eastern Europe.14 From 1880 to 1920, the city’s population swelled from 362,000 to 748,000, nearly three-quarters of which were first- or second-generation immigrants.15 Like many of the immigrants flooding into Boston from Eastern Europe at the time, Morris and Rebecca got their first foothold in the North End, a lobe of land jutting into Boston’s Inner Harbor densely packed with four- and five-story tenement buildings, where bathrooms were usually shared with several other apartments and rents were cheap. By the time their son Max was born, the neighborhood was dominated by Jewish and Italian immigrants.

  After a few years in the North End, Morris did well enough to move his growing family across the Charles River to Somerville, where Max attended elementary school and high school, and then to the West End, a slightly more comfortable immigrant landing place, where Morris owned bakeries and a baker’s supply shop. They bought an apartment in a redbrick building at 6 Poplar Court, just behind the famous Charlesbank Homes tenement, a five-story redbrick building of 305 two-, three-, and four-room apartments built as an early, private form of affordable housing by philanthropist Edwin Ginn.16 Once a Yankee bastion, the neighborhood received so many successive waves of immigrants—beginning with the Irish in the 1840s, followed by the Eastern European Jews in the 1880s and then the Italians in the 1890s—that by the time the Rohtsteins lived there in 1920 it was the most densely populated neighborhood in the city and just 10 percent of its inhabitants were native-born. It was the West End, where Max lived as a teenager, that would shape the rest of his life.

  By age seventeen, Max had dropped out of high school to work as a chauffeur in his father’s company.17 Although he had savvy and ambition, he was not the heir apparent. That role went to his older brother, Jacob, who would one day take over the bakery supply business, turn it into a trucking outfit, and pass it on to his son. Max had to forge his own path.

  * * *

  One of Max’s West End neighbors was Harry Sagansky, a stout, lugubriously dark-eyed middle child of Lithuanian immigrants four years Max’s senior. Sagansky was born with a hustle in his blood, a passion for baseball, and a mind for numbers. By the age of twelve, he was selling newspapers on the streets of the West End, and by sixteen, he had begun a gambling career that would last until he died peacefully in a Boston nursing home at the age of ninety-nine.

  Sagansky got his first taste of gambling at Boston Red Sox and Boston Braves games, where he discovered that his facility with math gave him an advantage. After briefly flirting with the idea of parlaying his good grades in school into a career as a lawyer, he fulfilled his upwardly mobile parents’ dreams by enrolling at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine at eighteen. But he made sure not to let his studies get in the way of his extracurricular activities. “He arranged his laboratory work when he was going to college to do that in the morning,” Sage said. “In those days, you played baseball in the afternoon. He would gamble on the games.”

  In 1919, he set up his practice in Scollay Square, Boston’s red-light district, above a pharmacy that functioned as a secret liquor store just as the country was descending into Prohibition. The area had become known as the “Sailor’s Haven,” according to Boston historian David Kruh, because it was just a quick subway ride from the Charlestown port and offered “many theaters and cheap restaurants and rent-by-the-hour hotels and motels in an area that was, by the ’20s and ’30s, beginning to run down.” Sailors, who had notoriously poor dental care, stopped by a row of dentist shops in the square amid their carousing. But dentistry, which was hard on Sagansky’s bad back and provided few accommodations in those days for the left-handed practitioner, turned out not to be the path to economic stability he had hoped. “The next-to-last patient told him he couldn’t pay my father for his dental work, so he gave him a live chicken,” Sage said. “That was the final straw.” By 1931, the year of the birth of his third child, he had left dentistry behind to become a full-time bookmaker. The only legacy of his trade would be his lifelong nickname, “Doc.”

  Before the arrival of state-sanctioned lotteries, the black-market lottery was big business in the working-class neighborhoods of American cities. It went by a variety of names—numbers game, numbers pool, numbers racket, policy racket—but in 1930s Boston everyone called it “nigger pool,” ostensibly because it was popular in black neighborhoods.18 But bookies hung out in bars, barbershops, and factory floors all over the city’s working-class districts, ready with their notebooks and pencils to mark down which three-digit numbers their bettors thought might be the total amount bet at the local racetrack. The winning number was published daily in the Boston American, and winners would get their winnings—usually at 600:1 odds—via runners the next day. “Everybody did it,” said Joe McDonald, a third-generation West End resident and president of the West End Museum board of directors. “Old ladies, grandmothers, workers. There was a bookie on every corner.”

  By July 29, 1932, a thirty-four-year-old Sagansky had made it far enough up the hierarchy of the numbers rackets to be invited to a closed-door meeting on the fifteenth floor of the Hotel Manger, a grand Art Deco affair at
the northern tip of the West End, to sort out the future of the lottery business in the city. North End gang leader Joseph Lombardi had convened the meet to address the rise of “chiselers,” newcomers to the numbers game who didn’t pay out when the numbers hit. But police, on the hunt for information about a recent gangland murder, raided the conference room and arrested all twenty-six men inside, charging them with “suspicion of knowledge” about the murder, the Boston Globe reported. Sagansky identified himself to the officers as “Harry Jasper,” a version of the “Doc Jasper” moniker that many of his clients (as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation) would know him by for decades to come. It was the first time that Sagansky would find himself in the news for his illegal livelihood, but far from the last. As would often happen in the decades that followed, the charges failed to stick.19