The King of Content

by Keach Hagey

  People close to the family believe it’s no coincidence that Ruth Ann joined an anticapitalist cult shortly after her family spent years fighting each other over money. According to a 1974 report by the New York Attorney General’s Office (which called Children of God a “cult”), “members are required to give personal belongings such as car, tape recorder, T.V. sets, bank accounts, and cash to leaders of local communes who, in turn, purportedly transfer the same to Berg and his family.” This “forsake-all doctrine,” which was the group’s initial primary source of money, also required new recruits to pledge all current and future income to the group.

  The report also found that “virtually every” former Children of God member it interviewed said they were “constantly exposed” to the following Bible verse:

  If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.

  Luke 14:26

  Berg’s Mo Letter from January 1, 1971, drove home the point:

  The parents have filled ’em so full of houses and cars and education and all that shit—it’s like making them eat their father’s dung!—And now the kids want to kill ’em for it! You can hardly blame ’em! I’ve felt that myself sometimes!34

  But the reality of Children of God was far darker than a mere critique of materialism or authority. Around the time Ruth Ann joined, Berg began to introduce free-love themes into his teachings, proclaiming a “One Wife” doctrine that removed the requirement of fidelity within marriage and blessing “sexual sharing” between unmarried people as long as it was done to serve God. Then, in 1976, Berg sanctioned “flirty fishing,” the practice of using sex to recruit new members.35 Berg called it “a radical way of witnessing and winning souls,” but by 1977, he began instructing the group’s women to charge for their services. “We can’t afford to just continue supporting some kind of a religious brothel, ministering to men who don’t pay their way,” Berg wrote. “Happy Hookin’—but make it pay!”36

  Eddie and Leila were beside themselves, as were Mickey and Belle. Over the years, the family—including Sumner—spent huge sums on investigators and deprogrammers,37 attempting to bring Ruth Ann back into the fold, but she escaped and rejoined the cult, which, after 1978, was renamed The Family.38 Leila even became politically active, lobbying for anticult legislation that would require solicitors from religious organizations to carry identification cards and set up a task force to study fund-raising of religious groups. In the spring of 1980, Leila told the police that two well-dressed men accosted her and held a knife to her throat in a darkened parking garage in an attempt to pressure her to stop her lobbying. “They had that glazed look of somebody who’s been in a cult,” she told the Boston Globe. “They threatened my mother and my husband if I continued to work against their religious purposes.” She told the paper that her daughter had been “deprogrammed” and had left home, but that seemed an optimistic spin on the situation.39 Leila and Eddie would never really get their daughter back.

  Meanwhile, in 1973, Michael was transferred from McLean to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, the premier psychiatric hospital in the country. His family believed that his ongoing need for institutionalization was tied to Ruth Ann’s disappearance. People close to Michael say that he worshipped his older sister, but he would have been insulated from the furor caused by her disappearance. He spent a little more than a year at Menninger, attending its accredited Southard School for emotionally disturbed adolescents, during which, he later testified, “nobody visited me.”40

  Sometime after his seventeenth birthday, Michael managed an escape. “I had broken into an office and called an attorney and actually called the ACLU as well, and they agreed to take my case, went to court. They ordered my parents—custody removed from my parents, given temporarily to my attorney, and they assessed damages,” Michael said.41 The lawyer that Michael found in the phone book in turn called a local lawyer named Ralph Skoog, who filed a suit to get Michael out of Menninger.

  “He didn’t want to be out there at the Menninger School, and didn’t think that he belonged there, so we brought an action in the court to determine he was correct. They didn’t have any power to keep him there against his wishes,” Skoog said, adding, “We were in the transition at the time from when kids were supposed to do what their parents tell them to do until they finally got to this situation under the law that children had constitutional rights too.”

  The first person from Michael’s family to arrive in Topeka for the trial was Mickey, followed by Sumner, who Skoog described as the “steady hand” behind the whole process of getting Michael on his feet. Eddie and Leila were not there, which was probably just as well. “I think we established at trial that Leila was probably mentally ill . . . and their two children ended up getting the brunt of it,” Skoog said. As far as Eddie went, “He supported his wife instead of his children.”

  Michael ended up staying with Skoog, a father of five, for about six weeks, during which Skoog said he saw no signs of mental illness. “I don’t know if there was anything wrong with him except that he was treated so strangely that he responded like kids do sometimes who are strong-willed. I never noticed that he had any difficulty, except that his response to things was different occasionally than my children’s would have been.”

  Skoog said he does not remember what diagnosis, if any, Michael was given at Menninger, but he believed his parents put him there in part because “he, like a lot of youngsters, had smoked some pot.” (Eddie, a New England curmudgeon who liked to drink and smoke to abandon at times, held a predictably dim view of the counterculture for his children’s generation, telling the Globe in the midst of a kerfuffle over screenings of the documentary film Woodstock, “Personally, the concept of Woodstock to me is repulsive but I have no right to impose my views on other people.”)42

  Michael believed he was in Menninger because his parents didn’t want to deal with him. “He thought they were all involved with themselves, and their children were a burden, and they’d have the treatment first-class, but they wouldn’t put up with it themselves,” Skoog said. “Menninger was first-class.”

  After winning the case, Michael enrolled in Washburn University in Topeka for a semester. Skoog helped set him up with an apartment near campus and, with Sumner’s help, got him a car and license. Sumner began calling Michael regularly to check up on him. “Primarily, he was pushing me to get organized about going to school,” Michael said. “It was about being in school and how my grades were and not to screw around and stuff like that. . . . Nobody had ever paid attention to me before, so . . . I was appreciative.”43 These pep talks would continue through the next few years, as Michael moved to Florida to be near his grandparents, and then back to Boston to attend Northeastern University.

  Skoog remained another lifelong mentor for Michael, attending his wedding and visiting Sumner and Mickey in their offices in Boston on occasion. But the thing that stuck in his mind the most from the whole episode was the few days Mickey spent hanging around his house before Sumner and their lawyers showed up for the trial. Perhaps put at ease by Skoog’s plainspoken intelligence and midwestern drawl, the old man unburdened himself.

  “He kept telling me, ‘I just don’t understand. We’ve got these two boys, and we’ve given them everything in the world. We made them rich. And it just doesn’t help. They turn on you,’” Skoog said.

  * * *

  Some family members say Sumner nudged not only his brother but also his father aside before his father was truly ready, which might explain Mickey’s lament about not just one but both sons turning on him. “I remember the sense that at the point where Mickey retired from active control of the business, that that was a difficult transition for him,” said Russ Charif. “There has been all kinds of speculation about how Sumner pushed his father out.”

  Chapter 7

  “Artful Dealings”

  “Contrary to popular assumpt
ion,” Sumner wrote his fellow Harvard alumni at the end of the 1960s about his role at the helm of the exhibitors’ trade group, “my primary function was not attending cocktail parties with famous stars and starlets (something my wife would have objected to anyhow).”1 But by the mid-1970s, that’s exactly what he was doing—clutching a cigar and chatting up baby-faced Paramount Pictures chairman Barry Diller while a mustachioed Dustin Hoffman and white tunic–clad Marlo Thomas worked the room at the studio’s sales convention in Los Angeles;2 lunching in Hollywood with Twentieth Century Fox chief executive Dennis Stanfill;3 dancing the hora at Paramount’s president Frank Yablans’s son’s bar mitzvah;4 playing tennis with former Paramount chief-turned-producer Robert Evans amid the rose gardens, fountains, and four-hundred-year-old sycamore of his Beverly Hills estate.5 “He screams and argues about every point,” Evans complained to Forbes about Sumner. “He’s the single most competitive tennis player I’ve ever seen.”6

  Sumner had always been close to the distributors that fed his family’s theaters, ever since his father had divvied up the brothers’ tasks and given him the crucial role of negotiating with the film companies.7 Over the years, some of the salesmen that he did daily battle with, like Yablans, climbed the corporate ladder, and Sumner remained close to them, cultivating a small circle of Hollywood insiders as intimates. Yablans, the son of a Brooklyn cabdriver with a high school education, had turned Love Story into a national phenomenon when he was running distribution at Paramount and was rewarded with the presidency of the studio in 1970. He shared Sumner’s bluntness, street smarts, and caustic sense of humor, as well as the nagging sense that he was destined for national office. Yablans once told New York magazine he was planning a run for president, while Sumner’s fund-raising work as the cochair of Senator Edmund Muskie’s 1972 presidential campaign had his colleagues convinced he was headed for Washington, D.C., himself. “If Muskie would have been elected, he would have been attorney general,” said longtime National Amusements executive Ed Knudson.

  Sumner’s friendship with Yablans grew out of his special relationship with Paramount. When corporate raider Herbert Siegel tried to take over Paramount in the 1960s, Sumner, as head of NATO, had been part of the management’s resistance to the takeover,8 paving the way for the studio to be bought by the manic conglomerate assembler Charles Bluhdorn’s Gulf + Western. Bluhdorn, a brilliant and impulsive corporate marauder with thick glasses and an even thicker Austrian accent, used the former auto parts company as a vessel to gobble up a dizzying array of unrelated businesses, but his bold moves at Paramount helped usher in a golden age. He plucked actor-turned-producer Robert Evans out of obscurity and placed him in charge of production at the studio, amid howls of protest from the rest of Hollywood, and Evans took Paramount from last place to number one, overseeing hits like Chinatown, Love Story, and The Godfather. Evans and Yablans, representing the creative and business sides of Paramount, both became Sumner’s close friends.

  In 1974, thirty-two-year-old Barry Diller, an urbane television prodigy, succeeded Yablans at Paramount, thus becoming the youngest-ever studio chief. He also inherited that special relationship with Sumner. “Shortly after I came to Paramount, I was confronted with ‘Redstone issues,’ which every leader of Paramount had been confronted with for the past ten, fifteen, twenty years,” Diller said. These issues essentially consisted of Sumner’s insistence that his theaters get a better cut of box office revenue from Paramount films than his rivals got. “The only exhibitor that I ever dealt with in that manner was Mr. Redstone, who always complained that he deserved a rebate for all his good work during the year.” Diller chalked up Sumner’s success in getting that rebate to “the tenacity of Sumner Redstone, plus very artful dealings with the distributor class.”

  Among the most useful assets that Sumner brought to these dealings was his photographic memory. “Sumner could tell you what a movie did six years ago in Toledo, Ohio,” Knudson said. “Every gross he knew. You could not ever trick him.” The obsessiveness he had inherited from his mother also helped. “I can remember booking meetings that would stretch from six thirty a.m. to almost noon because he was trying to figure out what two pictures to put together at a drive-in in Lansing, Michigan, that he thought would work well,” Knudson said. These traits also made him something of a nightmare to work for. “He would call up in the middle of the night and say the time clock in the Globe was wrong,” recalled Carol Aaron, who placed ads for the theaters in the 1970s. “He was very rude, very dismissive. He cut you off in mid-sentence.”

  National Amusements’ early commitment to owning the real estate under its theaters also helped. With Sumner having completely consolidated power, the theater chain spent the 1970s and ’80s building, turning its drive-ins into indoor theaters and its indoor theaters into increasingly sumptuous multiplexes—a term the company trademarked.9 Starting with 52 drive-ins and 41 indoor theater screens in the wake of Eddie’s departure,10 Sumner had more than doubled the number of screens to 250 in less than a decade,11 becoming the tenth-largest theater chain in the country. The Redstone Theaters, as they were largely known in the industry, became famous for their comfortable, rocking chair–style seats, high-quality sound, and airy lobbies filled with framed film posters from Hollywood’s golden age.12 “Our theaters were totally different than anybody else’s,” Knudson said. “They were very big, and they had free parking.” Most important, the Redstone Theaters became known for having the very best first-run films in their markets.13

  The theaters were so successful getting the best movies that they began to draw complaints of monopoly from competitors—first in the press, then in the courts. In East Hartford, Connecticut, one grand old downtown theater owner said he had to switch to pornography—“not hard, not soft, but in between”—after the Redstone Theaters’ ability to get big attractions like The Exorcist at its various suburban Showcase Cinema multiplexes made it impossible to compete.14 In New Haven, the downtown movie theaters were forced to drop their prices to 99 cents to try to lure moviegoers back from lining up on the highway exits to get into the first-run movies playing for $3.50 at the Redstones’ Showcase Cinema V. “It is absurd to say that we control New Haven,” Sumner told BoxOffice in response, not particularly believably.15 After five theaters in Connecticut shut down in one year, the operator of one chain laid it squarely at the Redstones’ feet: “There is an extreme shortage of product. Redstone has been able to obtain the major films out of Hollywood on an exclusive basis and will not share play dates with the other theaters.”16 In 1975, three small-time theater owners in the Quad Cities of Iowa and Illinois, where National Amusements owned six theaters, filed an $11.4 million lawsuit against National Amusements and nine of the biggest studios and distributors, alleging they had conspired to give National Amusements a “monopolistic position” in the market.17

  Sarge Dubinsky, a member of the film family behind AMC Theatres, was one of the small theater chain owners who sued. In the course of discovery for the lawsuit, he found out that the distributors were agreeing to take a significantly smaller percentage of the box office receipts from Redstone Theaters than from their competitors. While they might get a distributor to agree to take 50 to 60 percent of the gross from a successful movie the first week, he said National Amusements would somehow get the distributor to agree to only 40 percent. “I could never quite figure out why [the distributors] did it, but they did. It seemed to be a relationship that had been established over time. He worked it for what it was worth,” Dubinsky said. “Sumner Redstone is a ferocious competitor, and a highly skilled one.”

  A. Alan Friedberg, an exhibitor whose career started in the Boston-based Sack Theaters in the 1950s and went on to include the chairmanship of the nine-hundred-screen Loews Theaters—the country’s fifth-largest chain—by the late 1980s, competed against National Amusements for decades. “He was ruthless,” Friedberg said. “He would do anything to win.”

  Dubinsky and his fellow plaintiffs capitalized
on this perception, using a memo from a former National Amusements employee to allege that Sumner bribed Yablans to help his theaters get first crack at movies distributed by Paramount.18 The response from Sumner, National Amusements, and Yablans was swift and brutal—categorical denials and a barrage of countersuits, including a $10 million libel suit.19 The litigation was eventually settled, but for years afterward, the trade press was filled with retractions and apologies to Sumner and Yablans from one exhibitor or another connected to the case. “I have not discovered nor do I have any evidence substantiating any wrongdoing by Mr. Redstone or by Mr. Yablans,” Grand Rapids exhibitor Robert Emmett Goodrich told BoxOffice, in one typical example. “I regretfully apologize for any embarrassment that the distribution of the memorandum has caused Mr. Redstone and Mr. Yablans.” To top it all off, Goodrich was forced to donate $10,000 each to the Will Rogers Hospital in the name of Frank Yablans and to the National Association of Theatre Owners in the name of Sumner Redstone.20

  “That’s the way Sumner operated: if you step on his toe, he’ll smack you on the head,” Dubinsky said. “If I could go back and stay out of his markets totally, that’s what I would have done.”

  In an industry rife with litigation, Sumner stood out. His prominence as a trained lawyer made him both uniquely feared within and uniquely valuable to the exhibition business. As president of NATO, he used his legal chops and experience at the Department of Justice to lead the industry’s fight against blind bidding, the film companies’ practice of requiring theater owners to bid for the right to show a first-run film before they had the chance to see it. The DOJ put a few mild restrictions on the practice, but in 1968, the matter made it to federal court, where Sumner represented NATO personally, arguing that the practice was discriminatory since some big exhibitors with good relations with the film companies—he didn’t say it, but like himself—would always have an advantage over smaller players who remained in the dark about how good the movies they were buying were.21 The argument fell mostly on deaf ears, however, so Sumner continued to lead the fight at the state level,22 where NATO and other exhibitor groups were trying to get state legislatures to ban the practice. In April 1978, Sumner went before the New York State Assembly arguing that the practice was unfair because it deprived exhibitors of the right to exercise their business judgment about the merits of a movie. Pointing to Exorcist II, a Warner Bros. debacle that a BBC film critic declared “quite demonstrably the worst film ever made,” Sumner said, “We put this trash on the screen, not only lost money, but had our customers criticizing us and holding us accountable for something we were contractually bound to and never saw.” He argued that admission prices were being driven up to offset the huge advances that the “oligopoly” of the film companies were demanding.23 In June 1979, New York became the fifteenth state to ban blind bidding.24