The King of Content

by Keach Hagey

  Eddie and Leila were near the end of their rope. They enrolled him in another boarding school and began to discuss with Dr. Walzer what they could do to, in the words of one person close to the family, “try to get him straightened out.” Their solution would trigger a series of events that would lead to the breakup of both the business and the family.

  Chapter 6

  “From One Catastrophe to Another”

  Michael Redstone had not wanted to go to summer camp,1 but his parents insisted. He was twelve years old but already world-weary, well acquainted with principals’ and psychiatrists’ offices, and the thinking was that the brisk Maine air would do him good. In fact, it had been the recommendation of his psychiatrist, Stanley Walzer, who spent his summers as the doctor at Camp Powhatan, one of the oldest Jewish summer camps in Maine, that he give camping a try. But it was also simply what nice Jewish boys from places like Newton did in the summer—head north to the pristine forests of Vermont, New Hampshire, and especially Maine, to build “character” and form friendships that would help them succeed in society. In general, these camps had Jewish services and Jewish staff but rarely spent much energy on Jewishness; there was too much canoeing to do, too many sing-alongs. It was not Michael’s cup of tea, however, so late one night in early July 1970, while the rest of the campers slept, he snuck out of his cabin and padded over to the recreation center, where he lit a fire and then took off into the night.2

  He didn’t get far. Within two hours,3 he was captured and hauled back to camp, and his parents were called. They, in turn, called Dr. Walzer, who had a grim recommendation: it was time to have Michael committed. Eddie came up to meet with the camp director and then brought Michael back to Boston, where on July 11 he was admitted to McLean Hospital, the grand old mental hospital that had been treating Boston’s elite since the early nineteenth century.

  Being locked up in McLean put Michael in distinguished historical company. Founded in 1817 for an aristocratic clientele, the hospital’s campus of brick mansions sprawled over 240 wooded acres, dotted with stables and orchards, that had been selected by Frederick Law Olmsted, himself a McLean patient. Early patients enjoyed private rooms with fireplaces, parlors, and private bathrooms, and the wards bear the names of Boston’s great families. In the twentieth century, it became a kind of breeding ground for Pulitzer Prize–winning poets, with Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton all passing through its halls and writing about it. In one poem, Lowell described his fellow patients as “Mayflower screwballs” and “thoroughbred mental cases.”4 But McLean would fully flood the American consciousness a year into Michael’s stay there, when Plath’s semiautobiographical novel The Bell Jar, which lightly fictionalized her treatment in McLean, was published in the United States and became a bestseller.5

  Michael’s four years at McLean would contain none of this glamour. He was pumped full of Thorazine—he claimed at the “obscene” dose of 1,400 milligrams per day6—and Mellaril, heavily sedating antipsychotic medications that today would be considered unthinkable to administer to an adolescent. He would later describe the experience to people close to him as an array of horrors, from being put in a wet straitjacket to being forced to room with people with violent pasts to being held in solitary confinement. “I was often locked in a room with nothing but a mattress for much of those four years,” Michael said under oath decades later.7

  Mickey and Belle were horrified by Eddie and Leila’s decision, which confirmed every suspicion they ever had about their moody, aloof daughter-in-law and undermined their confidence that Eddie had his child’s best interest at heart. The grandparents were close to Michael and believed his problems stemmed mostly from conflict with his parents. They were also of the old, bootstrapping immigrant school that believed that calling upon psychiatrists brought shame upon the family. Joined by Sumner, they demanded that Eddie and Leila remove Michael from McLean, which bred deep resentment from Eddie and Leila regarding the intrusion into their personal lives. The cracks that had been creeping across the facade of family togetherness throughout the 1960s now broke open into a gulf.8

  “My grandparents didn’t like my parents,” Michael said of this period. “My parents didn’t like my grandparents.”9

  Eddie had toyed with the idea of leaving the family business for years, but his mother, father, or brother had always coaxed him back into the fold. But as he and Leila were preoccupied with Michael’s mental health crisis, Eddie began to feel increasingly left out of big decisions at National Amusements. Things came to a head when Sumner hired Jerry Swedroe, a sideburns-sporting exhibition executive with a résumé stretching back to the 1940s,10 to run the operations that had previously been Eddie’s job. Eddie was livid, and in June 1971, he quit.

  He demanded his 100 shares, which were kept at National Amusements’ headquarters in Dedham, but his father refused to hand over the stock certificates, arguing that National Amusements had the right of first refusal to buy back the shares. Mickey and his lawyers then invented a new reason why Eddie couldn’t have his shares: that half of them had actually been held in an “oral trust” for Michael and Ruth Ann ever since Mickey doled them out in 1959. The oral trust argument was ingenious for several reasons. On its face, it rested on the at-least-somewhat-provable fact that Mickey had put in 48 percent of the stock at the time of National Amusements’ founding but only received 33.3 percent of the shares, giving Mickey grounds for claiming he had additional say over what his sons did with “their” shares.11 Second, the lack of a paper trail—and there was none12—does not disprove the existence of an oral trust. Third, the trust structure would let Mickey and Belle voice their reservations about Eddie’s parenting choices. And fourth, since Sumner would become the trustee of these trusts, it would keep the assets under family control for longer, while ensuring that the transfer of wealth would completely bypass Leila, whom Mickey once called within Michael’s earshot an “evil, scheming cunt.”13

  Well aware that he was facing formidable adversaries, Eddie hired a well-respected Boston lawyer named James DeGiacomo to try to recover his shares, threatening that if his father and brother didn’t give him a good price, he would sell them to an outsider—the ultimate act of war.14 For weeks, Eddie tried to entice his father and brother to sit down with him to negotiate, but National Amusements’ lawyer, Lou Winer, refused.

  “I have been disregarded, rejected, and devalued by Sumner and you,” Eddie wrote his father on July 19, 1971. “Furthermore, it’s very difficult, in fact impossible, for me to believe that you have the interests of my immediate family and me at heart.”

  Eddie, his heart ever on his sleeve, summed up his relationship with his father: “You know, Dad, whenever you and I have a difference of opinion, I talk ‘apples’ and you talk ‘peaches,’ so to speak.” Hoping that DeGiacomo could open lines of communication that he alone could not, he added, “Do the family a service—meet with Jim prior to the institution of litigation. You’ve never respected my judgement [sic], and I urge you for once to do so.” Throughout the letter, he repeated that he would do anything for his family, “but not at the expense of my self-respect.”15

  Sumner has always been cagey about his role in the dispute. In his autobiography, he was open about how his father’s decision to turn “the basic operation of the business to me” very quickly after he arrived “caused some tension between Edward and me.” But he denied playing any role in pushing his brother out of the company. On the contrary, when Eddie began talking seriously about leaving the company to go into banking in later years, Sumner wrote, “I sat with my brother at a California hotel and pleaded with him, ‘Eddie, don’t leave. You have everything to gain by staying. You want to go into the banking business? Start doing that while you are at our company. It will provide you with a base of operations.’”16

  During his testimony in a lawsuit that his nephew, Michael, brought against him in 2006, Sumner repeated the story about begging Eddie to stay and said he didn’t remember hir
ing anyone to replace him in June 1971, adding, “My father would have probably made the decision.” But in the next breath, when asked whether his father was still making the principal decisions in the business in 1971 and 1972, he replied, “I’m not sure that’s true. At a certain point, my father got a bag of golf clubs and started spending his time—with my blessing, of course, because I thought it was good for him, he had worked hard all his life—started playing a lot of golf. And at that point I pretty much took over.”

  In his testimony, he characterized the fight as being between his father and his brother. He was sympathetic to his brother’s view that he had no restrictions on his stock, but he also agreed with the general thrust of his father’s wish that Eddie set aside stock for his own children. “I myself had the sense that our company’s heritage and culture was that the stock went from generation to generation,” he said.17

  Indeed, it was Sumner who led National Amusements’ negotiations for Eddie’s exit, with Mickey only attending a few of the “numerous” meetings with DeGiacomo in the six months following his hiring, according to a memo DeGiacomo wrote the following June.18 The two sides explored various options, including trying to keep Eddie on as an employee or consultant or having Eddie sell back his 100 shares to National Amusements. But Mickey would not sign on to a deal that did not acknowledge the existence of an “oral trust” for the benefit of Eddie’s children. And so, by December 1971, they had reached an impasse, and Eddie sued his father, his brother, and their family company in Massachusetts Superior Court.19

  Belle, excitable already, did not take the family infighting well. She penned a desperate letter to her son, begging him to reconsider the suit. The letter contained many of the tropes that successive generations of Redstones would use in their own infighting, including threats to avoid family members’ funerals and charges that the younger generation played no role in helping build aspects of the business. “Dad’s position is that when you were a youngster and still at school the stock that he put in Nat’l like Sunrise, Whitestone, Dedham, Natick and Revere belongs to your children,” she wrote. “You made NO contribution to these theatres, and that he will move heaven and earth before he will turn it over to you to sell and to put money in your pocket. I scrubbed plenty of floors and did plenty of menial work to help Dad accomplish this and I can’t see it either. All we want to do is protect your children. Don’t you think this is reasonable? Eddie, it seems to me that you are going from one catastrophe to another. All you are going to accomplish is financial ruin for Sumner and your own family.”

  She ended the letter with a surreal, motherly nudge to call more often, before plunging the knife in where it hurt most: “P.S. Michael just called and sounded wonderful! As a matter of fact, the last few times I spoke to him, he sounded good. He said he might come down for the weekend. We are all excited. Why don’t you come with him?”20

  Eddie, against his own better judgment, responded immediately. “Under all the laws of God, there is no justification for Sumner’s and Dad’s activities. For your position you only understand what has been told you. In addition to which, and I don’t mean to be unkind, you are the result of years of receiving unbelievable cruelty from Dad. Knowing that which has occurred, no one, but no one, can expect anyone to believe that Sumner and Dad have my family’s and my best interest at heart. The immorality of their activities is almost beyond belief.”21

  While the increasingly adversarial litigation proceeded through the courts, the parties continued to negotiate, and by June 30, 1972, they had come to a settlement. Eddie would get 662/3 shares and agree to put the remaining 331/3 shares into a trust for his children. Eddie then agreed to sell his shares back to NAI for $5 million and to walk away from National Amusements forever. Most important, for the future of the company, Sumner was named the sole trustee of both of Eddie’s children’s trusts.22

  Years later, Eddie was at a loss to explain how he had left his children’s trusts under Sumner’s control. “I was under duress just to get out. Tremendous duress. And frankly I signed everything that would be put in front of me just to get away from them.” Sumner may have urged him on occasion not to leave the business, Eddie said, but he “acted contrary to his words.” “Sumner controlled my father until almost the very end. So you can’t fight City Hall.”23

  While Eddie was setting up the trusts for his children to settle litigation, Sumner voluntarily decided to set up parallel trusts for his own children, as a way of validating his father’s claim that there had been oral trusts for these children all along. “I wanted to do the same thing as my brother did, only he did it as a result of litigation,” Sumner testified in 2006. “I gave my kids a third of the stock voluntarily, not as the result of a lawsuit. In so doing, I did what I wanted and appeased my father too.” (Sumner would come to regret these words, as the IRS used them to come after him for more than $15 million in unpaid gift tax and interest forty years after the fact.) Once again he made himself the sole trustee and gave himself similar powers over how, when, and at what price National Amusements shares in the trusts were redeemed.24

  By 1972, Sumner was firmly in charge, not just of the company’s operations but of its shares. In addition to his direct ownership of 662/3 shares (or 36.4 percent of the company), he was the sole trustee of the Brent and Shari Trusts and the Ruth Ann and Michael Trusts, which together made up another 662/3 shares (or 36.4 percent of the company). He was also still one of the trustees on the Grandchildren’s Trust, which contained 50 shares, or 27.2 percent interest.25

  The Ruth Ann, Michael, Brent, and Shari Trusts were written such that they would not have access to the money until they turned forty, giving Sumner a long and unencumbered runway to fly National Amusements to another altitude entirely.

  * * *

  A month after Eddie ended two years of bitter fighting over his role in the family business, his daughter entered her freshman year at Brandeis University. Ruth Ann was beautiful, with her mother’s large eyes and bold brows, and long, honey-colored hair that she wore with a flower child’s middle part. She had been deeply shaken by the shooting of unarmed college students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University two years earlier and found Brandeis full of kindred spirits. The small liberal arts college just outside of Boston had developed a reputation as a hotbed of radicalism by the early 1970s, thanks to the activities of both famous alumni, like Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman, and less famous alumnae, like Susan Saxe and Kathy Power, the Brandeis roommates who spent twenty-three years on the run from the FBI for their role in a September 1970 bank robbery and murder of a police officer tied to an antiwar plot to arm the Black Panthers and overthrow the federal government. By late 1970, one student complained to the Chicago Tribune, “Brandeis has become a word like Chappaquiddick—standing for some mystical evil.”

  While Brandeis had its share of Marxist professors, student strikes against the war, and sit-ins for civil rights, it’s debatable whether the idyllic New England campus really bred more radicals than any other university at that profoundly turbulent social moment. But Brandeis was unique in the freedom that it granted students. As the Chicago Tribune put it: “the place has almost no regulations. Upperclassmen have unlimited cuts. No one does bed checks at night. You can live off campus if you like—20 percent do. The kids say they respect two main rules—Be discreet, and wear shoes in the dining room.”26

  Ruth Ann was ill-prepared for this kind of freedom. She had attended the Winsor School, formerly Miss Winsor’s School, a small, prestigious, all-girls prep school founded in the nineteenth century. “She had been sheltered to an extent whereby it seemed, in conflict with her outward intelligence, her inner coding remained that of a girl entering an adult world of which she had little awareness,” Gary Snyder said.

  Around the same time that this idealistic girl was being let loose on a campus roiling with antiestablishment fervor, a band of self-described “Jesus freaks” were making their way east from California, stopping
by antiwar rallies and college campuses27 targeting young hippies with their gospel that society was broken beyond repair. Children of God was founded in Huntington Beach, California, in 1968 by David Berg, the middle-aged son of Christian evangelists, who preached that his followers should prepare for the imminent apocalypse by emulating early Christians and dropping out of all secular occupations, surrendering all worldly possessions to the organization, living in communes, and devoting themselves full-time to evangelizing.28

  By 1970, having amassed hundreds of followers and grown a long, white beard, Berg withdrew into seclusion in Europe, thereafter communicating with his followers through thousands of profanity-laced epistles known as Moses Letters, or Mo Letters, after his name within the group, Moses David.29 But the withdrawal of Berg only made the group more popular. By 1971, it boasted sixteen hundred members, and parents of many of them had begun to organize an opposition, claiming their children had been brainwashed by a cult that taught them to hate their parents.30 By 1972, Children of God had communes, which it called “colonies,” in 130 countries,31 but it was also feeling increasing heat from the authorities. In 1973, Berg instructed his followers to flee the United States and set up colonies around the world, predicting that the imminent arrival of the comet Kohoutek would bring about the destruction of America.32 Many of them fled to Latin America.

  Ruth Ann was among them. She completed her first year at Brandeis, enrolled in a second—and then disappeared. “She took . . . off from Brandeis and she wandered with some friends,” Eddie said in a deposition years later. “She originally went to South America.” When asked how long she wandered, Eddie replied, “For the rest of her life.”33