The King of Content

by Keach Hagey

  From the beginning, the school’s curriculum was anchored in Latin and Greek, with a tradition of Socratic argument and debate that includes, to this day, mandatory thrice-yearly “declamations” of memorized texts that must be delivered standing on a raised platform before one’s entire English class. As a public school in a Boston that was absorbing wave after wave of immigrants in the early decades of the twentieth century, it was diverse and ruthlessly meritocratic—its then largely working-class student body got in, before the days of standardized tests, on the strength of their lower school transcripts—leaving little room for camaraderie. “I can name four people in my six years here that we had general conversations,” Contompasis said. “It just didn’t happen.”

  Sumner seems to have been both traumatized and fortified by the experience, which set patterns that would remain for his entire life. “I had no social life. I had no friends. I knew people only because I sat next to them in class or because they were my closest competitors for the school awards,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I did nothing but study. Throughout high school, I don’t remember eating. . . . The primary lesson I learned at Boston Latin was that life is rough, that tension is frequently crushing, and that the only hope that counts is the hope that lies within each individual.”

  His first year, he caught scarlet fever, which kept him out of school for weeks—a terrifying prospect. “I don’t remember being scared of dying,” he wrote. “I do remember being terrorized by the fact that I was missing classes.” His mother, who had become close to his homeroom teacher and the school’s future headmaster, Wilfred O’Leary, brought him books, and he ended up winning the school’s classics prize and modern prize for the year, and every year after that.27

  Over many decades of being profiled in the press,28 Sumner would repeat some version of the boast that he went on to graduate with the “highest grade point average in the three-hundred-year history of Boston Latin.”29 As best it is possible to tell, this seems to be a hyperbolic flourish of the Mickey Redstone school of personal promotion. “When Sumner graduated, they did not keep grade point averages,” Contompasis said. “What I can tell you is, he did have an outstanding academic record. It was probably in the top 1 percent of his class.”

  But he would get his name on the wall of the auditorium, albeit not (yet) on the upper frieze. “The lower wall is individuals who have made significant contributions, not only to their particular professions, but who have also given back to the school,” Contompasis said. “Sumner was on the wall because he was a donor to the school.”

  Although Sumner maintained a nearly lifelong indifference to fancy (some might even say decent) clothes and developed a taste for grand houses only later in life, he would ultimately learn that money was an essential component to satisfying the craving for glory and power that Boston Latin had fostered in him. But before he came to this realization, he would set out into the world determined to satisfy it in what he believed was a more noble way, through public service. He had excelled at debate at Boston Latin, and entered Harvard, on scholarship, bound for its Debating Council30 and ultimately for Harvard Law School, where he would follow in the footsteps of his mother’s father and become a lawyer. When he passed the bar in September 1947, the Boston Globe ran a story mentioning him as one of several “sons of distinguished fathers”—including the son of a former governor of Maine—who were entering the legal profession that year. Although Mickey owned several drive-ins by that point, he was described as a “night club operator.”

  Immediately after taking the bar, Sumner married Phyllis Raphael, the petite, blond elder daughter of a department store founder living in Brookline, whom he had met during his freshman year at Harvard.31 Phyllis’s parents had both been born in the old country, in different corners of the Russian Empire. Like the Rohtsteins, Phyllis’s mother, the former Hilda Cherry, had come from a Jewish settlement in what is today Ukraine and passed through the West End.32 But Phyllis’s father, Eli Raphael, had emigrated much more recently, in 1915,33 and his ascent was much faster. By 1921, he had founded a group of department stores in Everett Square in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, and Phyllis grew up comfortably in the then largely Jewish suburbs of Mattapan and then Brookline. If young Sumner was driven and joyless, Phyllis was vivacious and carefree. Her only pet peeve, according to her high school yearbook, was when people tried to spell Phyllis “with one l and two s’s.” “She was an adorable girl who came from a lovely family,” Marilyn Riseman told Boston magazine. “A pretty, lovely, bright, sparkly little girl.”34

  Two years Sumner’s junior, she was still at Brookline High School when she met him at a temple dance.35 Her parents were not thrilled about their daughter dating the son of a nightclub owner, even though Mickey’s connections to Boston’s underworld had not yet become front-page news, so they sent her to UCLA. “Her parents did not want the marriage,” said one person close to the family. “They sent their daughter away.”

  After she graduated in 1946 with a degree in political science, she returned to Boston and enrolled in classes at Boston University36 while Sumner continued his pursuit. Belle Redstone approved of her son’s choice,37 and by January 1947 they were engaged.38 They were married on July 4, 1947,39 and headed off immediately afterward to San Francisco, where Sumner had accepted a prestigious, if not lucrative, job as a clerk in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for $43 a week.40 “I was not interested in either making a lot of money or limiting myself to academics,” Sumner later wrote. “The postwar world was going in a million different directions and I wanted to make a difference.”41

  After a year of clerking by day and teaching labor law at the University of San Francisco Law School at night, Sumner got his ticket to the corridors of national power in Washington, D.C., with a job on the staff of the Appellate Tax Division of the United States Attorney General. His hometown newspaper ran a story about the appointment, noting—no doubt at the nudging of some Redstone—that “he is one of the youngest lawyers ever appointed to this department.”

  On September 7, 1948, Sumner started his new job at the Department of Justice.42 The two and a half years he spent there were momentous ones for the department’s shaping of the media industry. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Paramount, Herbert Bergson, the department’s assistant attorney general in charge of antitrust, continued to lead the government’s fight against Paramount and the Big Eight’s anticompetitive practices as they wended their way through the courts.43 Though Sumner was assigned to the tax division and largely occupied by other matters during these years, in 1950, when Bergson left the Justice Department with his second in command, Herbert Borkland, Sumner followed them into private practice.44

  “It was the best antitrust firm in the country,” said Bergson’s son Paul. A year after Bergson left the Department of Justice, Peyton Ford, the deputy attorney general, also joined the firm. Later in 1951, a twenty-eight-year-old Sumner would join him as partner of Ford, Bergson, Adams, Borkland & Redstone.45

  Bergson was the “face of the firm, a diplomat,” said Borkland’s son, also named Herbert. “Borky”—as his family called him—“was essentially the workhorse.” One of the younger Borkland’s earliest memories, in fact, was meeting Sumner when he came by the house to discuss a case. “As a very young boy, I was insane about cowboys,” he said. “When he showed up, I insisted upon calling him Tonto, and this became a family joke” because Sumner was so clearly nobody’s sidekick. “Even for a boy, he was distinctive, a straight-standing, well-spoken man. He made an impression, even on a child.”

  The media industry, still very much in antitrust officials’ sights, was a critical part of the firm’s client portfolio. United Paramount Theatres, the chain of movie theaters that Paramount was forced to spin off in 1949 as a result of the Paramount case that Bergson led at the Justice Department, became a client. Ford Bergson represented UPT before the Federal Communications Commission in its petition to merge with ABC.46 After that m
erger was approved in 1953, the merged entity would eventually change its name to ABC and remain a key client until the firm, later reorganized as Bergson Borkland, met its demise in the 1980s amid the Reagan administration’s laissez-faire approach to antitrust.47 Sumner’s years at the firm gave him invaluable experience in the legal and antitrust issues facing theater chains—knowledge that he was about to start using to enrich himself and his family in a whole new way.

  * * *

  The crowning achievement of Sumner’s legal career was arguing a case before the Supreme Court for a hotel-owning couple who were in hot water with tax authorities for an unexplained surge in net worth.48 The court’s decision on Holland v. United States was handed down on December 6, 1954. Although Sumner was unable to get the couple’s conviction overturned, his argument that the government had the burden of proving that any suspicious increases in net worth were actually tax evasion did alter law, leading to the release of some prisoners.

  In boasting about it years later, Sumner could not simply leave the story at that. He went on to say that, in the mid-1950s, while out in Las Vegas representing a group that was building the Dunes Hotel, he met a man who was working at the Flamingo Hotel whose brother had been one of the men released from Alcatraz as a result of the decision. Sumner claimed that this man then introduced him to Bugsy Siegel—the infamous Jewish mobster, partner of Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, and architect of the Las Vegas Strip—who dangled untold riches in front of Sumner to entice him to come work his newly proven magic making unexplainable income untouchable by the tax man. “I wasn’t tempted,” Sumner wrote. “Money wasn’t my vice and I saw life in a very different way.”49 This story cannot be true, however, as Siegel rather famously got a pair of bullets in the head while sitting on his girlfriend’s couch in Beverly Hills in 1947.

  Sumner just got his mobsters mixed up. People close to the book project said that he had meant to say Gus Greenbaum, the associate of Meyer Lansky’s who took over the Flamingo after Siegel’s rubout and served as part of the inspiration for the character of Moe Greene in The Godfather.

  Ironically, this story, probably unwittingly, revealed Sumner’s connections to the mob. In his autobiography, he presents his work for the Dunes as the tail end of his Washington legal career. But he fails to mention that the group building the casino hotel included his father and Doc Sagansky, as well as some close associates of New England mob boss Raymond Patriarca.

  By the middle of the 1950s, Sumner was more than ready to get his hands dirty.

  * * *

  Indeed, Sumner describes his decision to go work for his father’s theater chain as a loss of innocence. Slowly, in the years since law school, it had dawned on him: “When you’re practicing law it’s just a business. It’s not a crusade for humanity, it’s a business. And when I reached that conclusion, I decided I was going into business for myself.” That’s an odd way of phrasing what he was doing because, by late 1954, the business he was talking about going into, then called the Northeast Theatre Corporation, had already become, in the hands of his father and brother, a rapidly growing chain of a dozen theaters.50

  In retelling the story in the subsequent decades, Sumner often minimized the size of the company that his father and brother had built when he joined it. One front-page profile of him in the Boston Globe in 1986 claims that, when he “assumed control” of the chain in 1954, “it consisted of one drive-in theater in Worcester,” though the words are the reporter’s, not his.51 In 1998, he told Forbes, “I started with two drive-in theaters before people knew what a drive-in theater was.”52 In his autobiography, he calls it “a handful of drive-ins.”53 In court testimony in 2009, he could only name two—Whitestone and Dedham—that were operating when he joined and says he was unsure if the one at Revere, which opened in 1948, had indeed preceded him.54

  By 1954, Mickey and Edward Redstone were riding the crest of a national wave of drive-in expansion. The company had opened the Sunrise Drive-In in Valley Stream, Long Island, in 1938; the Dedham and Revere drive-ins in the Greater Boston area in 1948;55 the Whitestone Bridge Drive-In in the Bronx in 1949;56 the Neponset Drive-In in Dorchester and the Natick Drive-In, in partnership with fellow Boston theater chain owner Phil Smith’s Midwest Drive-In Theater Corp., in 1950;57 a drive-in in Bay Shore, Long Island, which it opened in 1952 and sold in 1953; and the long-awaited VFW Parkway Drive-In in Boston’s West Roxbury neighborhood as well as the Lee Highway Drive-In in Merrifield, Virginia,58 in 1954. By October 1955, they would be operating fourteen across Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, and Florida.59

  These were family-friendly affairs, with free admission for children, playgrounds, and bottle warmers, almost always located at the intersection of two major highways. Drive-in owners during this period felt that they were largely immune to the growing competition from television that was hurting the indoor theaters, believing that people wanted to get out into the air. They generally enjoyed a more profitable business. In 1954, each dollar of payroll expense generated $4.72 of gross revenue for indoor theaters but $5.34 for drive-ins.60

  Sumner said his father was skeptical of his decision to join the company since “he was not a risk taker” and the move meant reducing his salary from more than $100,000 to $5,000. “But all I saw was opportunity,” he wrote.61 In fact, Sumner entered the drive-in industry just as it was peaking. In 1954, the average drive-in drew 93,100 admissions. Four years later, it had dropped to 82,000.62 The industry had overbuilt, and land prices were rising.

  Sumner’s exact role when he arrived at Northeast is somewhat murky. He wrote that when he arrived, Edward handled “general operations” and he handled “both expansion and the film companies,” but none of his examples of scouting for locations for building new drive-ins quite hold up. Consider this story from his autobiography:

  For instance, I flew into Louisville, Kentucky, drove around, saw several potential sites and finally found twenty acres of land at the intersection of two highways that would be perfect. I wanted to buy it. So I found out who owned the land, visited them, called in a secretary and a notary, modified the contract form as necessary and left with the deal. We called it the Kenwood Drive-In. Done. I did the same thing in Cincinnati. How did I know these were good sites? I just knew it! I operated as my own lawyer. Having handled the zoning for several of my father’s theaters, I knew the deals had to be conditioned on getting the planning and zoning permits. But you didn’t have to be a zoning lawyer, you just had to know what you were doing.63

  The Kenwood Drive-In opened, under that name, in 1949,64 and Northeast’s successor company, National Amusements, bought it in 1961 for $425,000.65 It might have been a good location, but Sumner didn’t scout it, build it, name it, or get its zoning permit. The same was true in Cincinnati, where the Oakley Drive-In opened in 1956, amid protests from residents, and Redstone Management/National Amusements bought it in 1963.66

  For all of Sumner’s talk of an immediate takeover, he kept a very low profile for the next four years, leaving it to his father to boast about opening six drive-ins in a single week in Greater Boston67 or his brother to answer questions about rain slowing construction of new drive-ins in the Rochester, New York, area.68

  But as the broader film industry hurtled toward the catastrophically bad year of 1958, when the Paramount-wounded business as a whole lost $19 million,69 Sumner found himself in possession of two skills that the industry needed far more than a keen eye for drive-in locations: experience as a persuasive orator on the national stage and a sophisticated understanding of antitrust law.

  In March 1958, Sumner Redstone flew out to his old stomping grounds in San Francisco for the first gathering of drive-in owners organized by the exhibitors trade group, the Theatre Owners of America. His official role as a moderator of a panel on ticket selling seemed almost laughably small,70 but when the press reported on what had happened there, it was as if he were the only one who had spoken.71 He pinned the woes of the industry on t
he Paramount decision. “Once the producers of pictures lost the houses in which to show their products, pretty soon there weren’t enough good pictures on the market to keep exhibitors busy,” he said.

  The studios then made the situation worse by licensing their pre-Paramount movies to television instead of to movie theaters who desperately needed the extra product to pad out their bills. “It worked out,” he continued, “that they were getting about $50,000 apiece for their films. Those films shown in privately owned theaters would have kept a lot of houses open and would have given the producer more money in the long run.”

  Attacking his mentor Bergson’s handiwork yet further, he argued that the restrictions in Paramount that barred exhibitors from moviemaking ought to be loosened. “Some way ought to be worked out to enable theater owners’ chains to produce their own pictures if Hollywood does not supply them.”72

  From his very first outing as a theater owner on the national stage, it was clear that Sumner Redstone wanted into the studio business. It was also clear that he had a future as an industry spokesman. By the time the Theatre Owners of America—a group that in previous years had lined up against drive-ins on a variety of issues from taxation to admission policies for children—had begun to organize its annual convention in Miami Beach in October, Sumner was named a cochairman of the event.73 And by July 1958, Variety, noting that the TOA had sent out a biography of Sumner to the press, was openly wondering: “Is Theatre Owners of America Giving Sumner M. Redstone the Big Buildup for an Important Post in the Organization?”74

  The answer, of course, was yes. At the convention at the Tisch brothers’ newly built Americana Hotel in the then sleepy village of Bal Harbour, Sumner Redstone could not have been more in his element as he stood before his colleagues and pressed the assistant attorney general in charge of the antitrust division of the Department of Justice (his boss’s old job) for changes to the Paramount consent decrees that barred exhibitors from making movies. “Do you think for one moment,” Sumner said, “that we would have the poverty of motion pictures available for exhibition which confronts us today if producers of motion pictures had a vast stake in motion picture theatres throughout the United States?” He added that the film industry was in a unique position in American industrial life “where exhibitors, as suppliers of a product to the public, are restricted from correcting inadequacies of that supply by producing it themselves.” He didn’t do much persuading. The assistant attorney general said the DOJ was going to maintain its position for the time being. But Sumner did make an impression before his exhibitor colleagues. Variety noted that he looked “like a young man with a future in the TOA echelon.”75