The King of Content

by Keach Hagey

  * * *

  By now, Bob Pittman was well-ensconced in his new offices in Rockefeller Plaza, where he was subletting space from his former bosses at Warner Communications while he got his new company, Quantum Media, backed by MCA, off the ground.33 He had left on reasonably good terms, and Viacom was pitching in with launching a record label for the new company. But in truth there was no love lost between Pittman and the Viacomese, who had nickeled-and-dimed him on his way out the door. Sumner asked him for some insight into Viacom. Pittman was only too happy to give the Bostonian insurgent his take: MTV Networks executives hated their new overlords, and talent was streaming out the door. Sumner was impressed by Pittman and asked him for entrée into MTV Networks. Pittman immediately called Freston and Laybourne, arguing, “You are right now the bastard stepchild of Viacom. But if you help Sumner and he gets the company, you are going to be the crown jewel.”

  “I didn’t know Sumner Redstone from Adam,” Freston recalled. “None of us did. I was just told there’s this cranky old guy from Boston who is taking positions, and if any of you talk to him, you’re going to be fired.” But Pittman was persuasive. A dinner was arranged at the Carlyle.

  Knowing nothing about Sumner beyond the thickness of his Kennedyesque Boston accent, Freston arrived at the Carlyle expecting something out of Camelot. The elegant Upper East Side residential hotel had become famous as JFK’s “New York White House,” thanks in part to its warren of tunnels that let the president discreetly smuggle in his mistresses, including, the legend goes, Marilyn Monroe.34 He was surprised to find a relatively modest single rented room—Sumner had not yet rented an apartment there—with Phyllis’s cotton underwear drying on a line over the bathtub. She’s doing her own laundry in a single room, he marveled to himself.

  But Sumner proved a charming dining companion, full of questions about the young MTV Networks. “I got him very excited about the company,” Freston recalled. “I would trade this guy, the devil I don’t know, for the devil I know, which were these guys who didn’t seem to have a vision that was on par with what we wanted to do with the company.” Sumner wanted to know if they would leave if he bought the company and fired Elkes and the other managers who were behind the LBO. “We said, ‘Hell, no,’” recalled Laybourne. “We would see it as a chance to really take control of our businesses.” They invited him to come see their offices, which were located at 1775 Broadway, a healthy walk north from Viacom’s headquarters in 1211 Avenue of the Americas. If the Viacomese found out, they’d be fired, but they figured they could slip him in.

  Early the next morning, he showed up in the lobby with a rumpled sport coat, mismatched pants, a checked shirt, and a dab of shaving cream on his ear. “I thought, ‘Look, he’s like an old man,’” Freston said. But Sumner was intoxicated by the chaotic scene that greeted him—music blaring, kids with long hair, quarter-inch and one-inch tapes stacked everywhere. “There were other things, too, that he liked about Viacom, but it was MTV Networks that really sold him,” Freston said. “He thought that was the sexiest part.”

  He returned to his war room in the Carlyle determined to win the company. He raised his bid several more times, and management matched it each time.35 Sumner, near the limits of his financing capacity, took a deep breath and asked Dauman and Ken Miller for a gut check: Should he really risk everything by going higher? “He turned to me and Ken and said, ‘I’m not going to do the deal unless you say yes,’” Dauman said. “That’s an unusual position for an outside lawyer.”

  Dauman and Miller agreed, and Sumner raised the bid again, to $3.4 billion. This time, he added a Redstonian flourish: threatening to sue Viacom’s board of directors. “To be frank, at the time I thought it was a questionable tactic,” recalled Miller. “You finally had to get the approval of the people you were suing. But he threatened their net worth, and that turned out to be fairly effective in a clinch.”

  Dauman, though concerned, was more open to the maneuver. He and Sumner penned the subtly but definitively threatening letter to the chairman of the subcommittee of Viacom’s board evaluating the bids. The kicker was clear enough: “The management must have the sense that it need not have the best offer in order to win. Neither we nor, we believe, the shareholders will stand for such a result.”36 Watching Sumner and Dauman go for the jugular in the courtly language of the law was a thing to behold, recalled Volk. “It was like Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim writing West Side Story.”

  The performance was a hit. On March 4, 1987, following a twelve-hour meeting at the financial district offices of the lawyers for the special committee, the Viacom board announced that they were rejecting management’s last-minute, junk bond–financed $3.3 billion bid. National Amusements had won the day and was now poised to swallow a company with five times its own revenue.37

  At sixty-three, Sumner Redstone was suddenly a media mogul. He was ebullient. “This could add another 10 years to my life,” he crowed to the Wall Street Journal. The financial press, by and large, was indulging but skeptical—suspicious that he had overpaid, unsure that he’d be able to handle the massive debt, and even less sure that he’d know what to do with Viacom’s sprawling operations after a lifetime of autocratically running a theater chain that the Journal called “a lean operation with practically no corporate staff.”38 Even at the height of the takeover battle, he had never stopped his habit of checking the theaters’ grosses each morning. But Sumner said all the right things, telling the New York Times, “I am going to have to change my management style now.”39

  In truth, he already had. As his passion had drifted away from exhibition through the mid-’80s, he had delegated more and more responsibility to his son-in-law, who had begun to use his international connections to put his own stamp on the company. The same month that Sumner seized Viacom, news began to dribble out that National Amusements was about to make its first expansion overseas with a multiplex in Nottingham, England.40 The move was Korff’s idea, built on relationships he had forged at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy—where he became friends with elite British figures like Michael Dobbs, the author of House of Cards—and in his work as an international mediator. Under Korff’s leadership, National would go on to become the dominant multiplex theater chain in the UK.

  Korff was also a close adviser to Sumner through the Viacom takeover, flying frequently to New York for negotiations at the Carlyle, and helping Sumner track a worst-case scenario in which, even if Viacom went belly-up, National would still have its real estate holdings anchoring its value. But Sumner’s own children remained far from the fray. The Journal noted that both were lawyers “who aren’t currently involved in the family business.”41 With three young children at home—including a one-year-old—Shari was focusing on being a full-time mom. Brent continued to work at the Boston DA’s office, with two young children of his own, Keryn and Lauren, known as Lee Lee.

  This was a triumphant moment for the family business, and yet Sumner had no blood relative to share it with. One month to the day after National won the bidding for Viacom, but months before the deal officially closed, Mickey died suddenly at the age of eighty-five in Florida. He’d been sharp up until the end, warily complying with Sumner’s demands in recent years that he shed his often colorful longtime partners in various subsidiaries and help him consolidate control. He did not especially appreciate Sumner’s more recent tours in the press, claiming he was a self-made man who grew up in a tenement. “It’s a good thing I was born before him, because he would take credit for that, too,” Mickey once quipped to a family member. But he was proud of his son and supported his decision to go after Viacom. The Boston Globe heralded him as “a prominent theater and night club owner,” pioneer of drive-ins, and important philanthropist, but his obituary in the New York Times was only three paragraphs long.42 No mention was made of Viacom.

  Death stalked the Redstones for the rest of the year. Three weeks after Mickey died, Eddie and Leila, then living on Martha’s Vineyard where Ed
die had recently purchased control of the local bank, got a call from the Japanese consulate. The consulate informed them that their daughter, Ruth Ann, had died on April 21 in Kashiwa, a Tokyo suburb, and then asked, “What should we do with the child?” Eddie and Leila were dumbfounded.43 They had had no idea that she was in Japan, let alone that she had a three-year-old son. They immediately boarded a plane to Japan to collect her body and their grandson, where they were greeted with new horrors. They discovered that during her pregnancy in Brazil, Ruth Ann had suffered from eclampsia, a blood pressure disorder that put her into a coma upon delivery and resulted in the amputation of most of her toes. Eddie and Leila ordered an autopsy and discovered that their thirty-two-year-old daughter had died of pneumonia, made fatal by a case of full-blown AIDS. Family members say she contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion from her health crisis in Brazil, but the cult, which by then had changed its name to The Family, was shaken by the implications of her disease for their free-love lifestyle.

  “The discovery sent shock waves through the Family,” wrote Ed Priebe, a former Family member, about the incident in 2002. “As much as they believed God was blessing them, as much as they felt that He would spare them from ‘the plagues of the Egyptians,’ they had to come face to face with grim reality: they weren’t immune to AIDS. What made it so serious was that the woman had had sex with members of Berg’s personal household.”44

  Eddie and Leila brought their grandson, a beautiful, dark-haired boy named Gabriel Adam Redstone, back to Massachusetts to raise as their own son. It was a chance at redemption after their relationships with their own two children had gone so horribly wrong. Although Ruth Ann was in her thirties and thus eligible for disbursements from her trust, she had never touched any of her money, and so the $7.5 million she had gotten for her 16.7 percent stake in National Amusements in 1984 went into a trust for her son, whom the Redstones would call Adam.45

  On July 1, Belle followed her husband into the grave, as if unsure of what to do with herself without him. “When she was in her late 70s, Belle still sighed and fussed over Michael like a teenager; until the day he died, and despite his numerous infidelities, Belle was madly in love with him,” wrote Belle’s great-niece Judith Newman in Vanity Fair.46 Sumner was grateful for all that his mother had pushed him to do, but his relationship with her had always been complicated, and her death brought both pain and relief. “One of the great regrets of my life is that neither my mother nor my father lived to see what I finally accomplished,” Sumner wrote.47

  In the end, Leila would not get a second chance to be a successful parent. On December 1, she “dropped dead,” as Eddie would later put it, of a heart attack, leaving him alone on the island with a young child.48

  The Viacom takeover simultaneously imprisoned and liberated Sumner in his love life. Just before he made his play for Viacom, he had finally decided, after fifteen years of talking about it, to leave Phyllis and make a new, public life with Delsa. On June 17, 1986, he filed for divorce, citing irretrievable breakdown and listing separate addresses for him and Phyllis in the paperwork, according to Boston magazine. But Viacom’s management’s lowball LBO offer in September pushed him to consider his own takeover, which would require National Amusements’ full financial force. Sumner could not risk losing half his assets in a divorce. Before making his counteroffer, Sumner withdrew his divorce suit on January 9, 1987.49 On paper at least, the corporate takeover that made Sumner also sealed him into an unhappy marriage.

  Once the Viacom takeover was complete, however, he felt financially strong enough to live the life he wanted with Delsa, regardless of his marital status. They picked out a gracious mid-century modern four-bedroom home on seventeen wooded acres in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and on August 24, 1988, a trust administered by George Abrams bought it for $1.75 million.50 Sumner moved in, and Delsa built a writer’s studio on the property. Sumner and Delsa threw dinner parties, attended weddings and bar mitzvahs together, took her children on vacations to places like the Caribbean and the Arizona desert, and filled photo albums like any other family. Sometimes her children even came along to events like the U.S. Open or MTV Video Music Awards, flown out on the Viacom private plane. Other times, Sumner would tell Phyllis that he was going out to dinner with Dauman and his wife when he wanted to go out with Delsa, knowing Dauman would cover for him. But just as often, Delsa had to stay home from Sumner’s most high-profile events, as much as she would have liked accompanying him to the Oscars or a Democratic convention. “I despair of ever being able to live in peace and happiness with Sumner,” Delsa wrote in her diary not long after moving to Lincoln. “We are too different. Understanding is missing. When I met him, I was someone else, I let him choose me. Myself, I didn’t know how to choose, just to be chosen.”51 Nonetheless, they lived as a family for many years, with Sumner providing Delsa the money she needed to live on. He was close to her children, particularly the younger two, Harte Weiner and Winn, helping them financially when they needed it. He brought Winn to stay with him at Bob Evans’s house, where Evans, upon hearing that Winn wanted to be an architect, showed him his first Fabergé egg and offered the counsel that “lighting is very important.” He especially bonded with Harte, whom he respected for having attended Harvard and earned multiple graduate degrees, and mentored her academic career, going so far as to fly her out to Stanford for graduate school. When she decided to have a child on her own with in vitro fertilization, she gave the child “Sumner” as a middle name. One day, as they were all coming back from Delsa’s father’s funeral in the early ’90s, Sumner turned to Winn and said, “Winn, I fucked up. I should have married your mother.”

  * * *

  Shortly after the Viacom deal closed that summer, Viacom held a retreat for its employees in Alpine, New Jersey. Buses carted everyone out to play softball, volleyball, and tennis and lie around the pool. Sumner made an appearance, but by mid-afternoon he had had enough and took the first bus back to the office, which was mostly empty on summer afternoons. Henry Schleiff, who had just been hired from HBO to run Viacom’s entertainment and broadcast groups, also returned early, and at around four o’clock, he got a call from Sumner in his office.

  “Henry, it’s Sumner. Are you busy?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Could you come down? I’d like to talk to you.”

  Henry, still in shorts and sneakers, a bit sweaty from playing tennis, went down to Sumner’s office, where he held court from his Barcalounger. Sumner swiveled around to look at him.

  “Can I ask you a question?” Sumner asked.

  “Sure,” Schleiff said, expecting another of Sumner’s Socratic interrogations of why affiliates pay cable programmers money.

  “Do you think we are alone in this world?”

  Schleiff looked at Sumner, unsure how to respond. Trying to inject some levity, he quipped, “You mean aliens?”

  Sumner gave Schleiff a look that said, No, you idiot.

  “No,” Sumner said. “Family. People. Do you think you’re alone?”

  Schleiff frantically grasped for something soothing to say. “No, Sumner, we have our parents, we have our wives and loved ones, our kids. You have your family.”

  Sumner scanned the room, paused, then looked directly at Schleiff.

  “No,” he said. “I think we are alone in this world.”

  Chapter 10

  Scaling Paramount

  From the beginning, Sumner spoke about Viacom in the language of love. “I have a great feeling for the company,” he told the Wall Street Journal in the flush of his 1987 takeover victory. “It’s on the cutting edge of so many growth businesses.”1 But he admitted that this feeling, though expansive, was also rather vague. “I didn’t really know the full difference between a basic channel and a pay channel,” he told a crowd of exhibitors that year.2 Viacom’s top management was on its way out, and Sumner knew that he needed a seasoned professional chief executive to run his new prize. During a three-day retreat on Martha’s V
ineyard to plan the transition of power, Viacom’s outgoing management suggested to Sumner a list that included former HBO chief executive Frank Biondi.3

  Biondi, forty-two, had left HBO amid a power struggle a few years before and gone on to lead the television division of Coca-Cola, which had gotten into the entertainment business after buying Columbia Pictures studio in 1981. A child of the New Jersey suburbs, he had an impeccable East Coast résumé, with a degree from Princeton, a Harvard MBA, and time on Wall Street before going into television.4 He would know what to do with the beleaguered Showtime, the thinking went, and had the financial chops to help Viacom with its substantial debt. With neatly parted hair and staid suits, there was nothing Hollywood about him, but his intelligence and candor charmed Wall Street analysts and the press alike. Many of the other people Sumner spoke to agreed he was the right person for the job. There was just one problem: Biondi had just sold his house in the tony northern Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale and bought a new one in Beverly Hills after Coke had asked him to move to their Burbank headquarters. His kids were already enrolled in new schools in Los Angeles. The moving van was coming in a week.

  Nevertheless, late one Friday in July, Sumner called Biondi at his office and told him, “Some guys in Hollywood told me that you would be the ideal person to run Viacom.” Biondi, whose straightforwardness would one day rub Redstone the wrong way, didn’t play too hard to get. “It would be better than where I am going,” he said. “But I’m moving in seven days.”

  “I get up at four a.m.,” Sumner replied. “Anytime after six a.m. come over to the hotel. We’ll get it done in a day.” Biondi arrived at the Carlyle by eight a.m., and by noon, they had a handshake agreement. Sumner had Dauman draw up the paperwork: a five-year contract starting at $600,000 a year, plus stock that Sumner told Biondi would be worth $15 million in five years, according to the New Yorker.5 Sumner called Biondi’s wife, Carol, congratulated her, and told her to unpack.6