When Hollywood Had a King

by Connie Bruck

  In 1966, Buffy Chandler asked Wasserman to become the president of the Center Theatre Group, a civic organization to support drama in the two theaters of the Music Center complex, the Mark Taper Forum and the Ahmanson. “Mrs. Chandler knew that if this Music Center complex was to survive, it couldn’t be just Pasadena and Orange County,” explained Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum. “It had to have the Westside, the Jewish community, the movie people. How do you get them? Get their leader.” He added, “Mrs. Chandler was very comfortable crossing lines.”

  Davidson chose to open the Mark Taper’s first season with a production of The Devils by Aldous Huxley—a play about a nun’s sexual fantasies and a libertine priest. When the play was in rehearsal, Davidson got a call from the Los Angeles archdiocese; the cardinal understood they were about to put on a play that was anti-Catholic—and he intended to denounce it. In addition, the County Board of Supervisors, which owned the property on which the Music Center complex stood, was backing the cardinal. Buffy Chandler enlisted her newly appointed president, Wasserman, to intercede, and before long he had appeased the cardinal, who in turn de-enlisted the county supervisors, and the production went forward without incident. The Devils, however, was not the last play at the Mark Taper to be deemed controversial, and often by the Chandlers’ friends. “If there were sex or dirty words, Mrs. Chandler’s friends would beat up on her,” Davidson said. “So we worked it out this way: I said, why don’t I tell you what plays you should come to see? If you don’t see it, you don’t have to have an opinion.”

  Wasserman brought in his friend, Paul Ziffren, as secretary-counsel to the Center Theatre Group. Ziffren, who had been a protégé of political boss Jake Arvey’s in Chicago, had moved to Los Angeles in the fifties, established an extremely successful Westside law practice, and become very active in Democratic politics. His son, Kenneth Ziffren, who would become one of the premier entertainment lawyers in L.A., was working in his father’s firm at the time Paul joined Wasserman in his theater enterprise. Ken knew Wasserman socially; Paul was entertaining a lot at his Malibu beach house in those days, Ken recalled, and “Lew and Edie were the honored guests.” Sidney Korshak was another. (“I knew Sidney well,” Ken said. “Charming guy, you never felt fear around him.”) But the first time he encountered Wasserman professionally was when his father assigned him to negotiate a long-term operating lease between the Center Theatre Group and the Music Center operating company. The Music Center company was represented by O’Melveny & Myers, a white-shoe, prestigious downtown law firm. “I started going downtown to meet with all the O’Melveny lawyers—at one meeting, there were eight of them and me! These negotiations went on for months, and eventually there was a manageable list of issues. My father said to prepare a memo for Mrs. Chandler, Lew, and him. I worked hard at it; he marked it up; I corrected it. I went and handed Lew the memo.

  “He looked at it and said, ‘Okay.’ He went down each issue and told me how it should come out. He said, ‘They’ll say this, then you say this, this is how it should go.’ He came up with answers and approaches that were totally beyond me. It was scary, really scary. So spectacular. It just bowled me over.”

  The Wasserman-Chandler connection came to extend beyond the Music Center complex. “Norman Chandler came to see me,” Wasserman recalled. “He wanted me to go on the board of Caltech [California Institute of Technology]. I said, ‘Why would they want me? One, I’m a Jew. Two, I’m in show business. Three, I’m from the Westside. Four, I never went to college.’

  “He said, ‘You’ve already been approved. I’m chairman of the nominating committee.’ ” It was a response that Wasserman (having arranged Valenti’s approval by the MPAA board in a similarly seigneurial way) could appreciate. “I was on that board for fifteen years.”

  Wasserman was helping to bring a little ecumenism to largely segregated communities. In doing so, of course, he was also extending his personal reach across this fissured city, in a far more profound way than Stein had ever done. In the course of a decade, Wasserman had added critical segments to his network—one that was “built on power and money,” as his friend, Washington attorney and Democratic eminence Robert Strauss, put it. “Lew is the only person I know who had one foot in the movie business, one foot in the business or financial community, one foot in the political community. He could call the Catholic archbishop just as easily as a rabbi, a defense contractor as easily as a studio chief, a banker as easily as a member of the Times editorial board. Because it was the movie colony, there was a kind of power that you couldn’t have in New York or Washington,” Strauss declared, and then added, sounding just a bit wistful, “No one person, in those cities, could have his power.”

  It was remarkable, really, how smooth Wasserman’s assumption within the movie industry had been. Remarkable that the other studio heads just gave way, that in an instant he was able to displace Nizer and substitute his own man at the MPAA, that he could usurp total control in the labor negotiations. It was almost as though his sovereignty had become so much a recognized fact of life in Hollywood that when he claimed one or another of its prerogatives, no one thought to object. No one, that is, except his primordial rival for the presidency of MCA, Taft Schreiber, and, more importantly, Jules Stein. For when MCA stumbled in the late sixties, Stein (at Schreiber’s instigation) effectively reminded Wasserman that it was he who still controlled the company, through his majority holdings—and that Wasserman could be deposed. That was the single fallacy in Wasserman’s near-perfect assumption.

  When the agency business had been shut down, Wasserman was liberated; but Stein suffered, seeing what he had built—his monument—disappear. He hated the stark black glass tower Wasserman chose for their new corporate headquarters (its offices were still filled with Stein’s antiques, but they were incongruous in this ultramodern setting), and he rejected Wasserman’s plan for a second tower. The idea of the tour had excited Wasserman from the start, but not Stein; he had recoiled slightly at the idea of the public’s trooping through their private domain. Still, he assented. “Al Dorskind brought me a photograph—it showed the old Universal commissary, which stood right where this [tower] is,” Wasserman said. “People paid a quarter, and they walked to the second floor and watched the movies being made—and they were silent! It was taken in 1919. I said to Dorskind, ‘Do you think they would still do it?’ ” In Wasserman’s tour, visitors rode in trams around the property, saw movies being filmed, stopped to see Doris Day’s dressing room, and glimpsed the computer Wasserman had purchased to provide the kinds of cost-control studies that made factories run more efficiently. Bob Rains, a publicist at Universal, wrote in his memoir, Beneath the Tinsel, that on the first day of the tour, in July 1964, Stein had suddenly appeared in the doorway of Wasserman’s office. He had taken the tour, he said, and he thought it would make the company money. “ ‘But we do have a serious problem,’ Stein remarked as he took an admission ticket out of his suit coat pocket. ‘Look at this! Nobody took my ticket after I purchased it. If something is not done to correct the situation, people will be giving their tickets to others once they leave the tour grounds. Think of the money we will be losing.’ ” Wasserman said he would take care of it right away.

  Notwithstanding Wasserman’s unfailing deference, there was no mistaking that Stein was more peripheral at the company than ever. He cast about for other activities, and even considered becoming a partner at the Lehman Brothers investment firm. It was Ed Weisl’s suggestion—which may well have been instigated by Weisl’s close cohort Wasserman. As Stein said later, “I was flattered. I mentioned the offer to Wasserman. He said that now that I had more time it might not be such a bad idea.” Stein met with Bobby Lehman, who suggested that Stein might eventually succeed him as head of Lehman Brothers, and Stein asked to spend some time at the Wall Street firm in order to make up his mind. “I went there every day for a few months. I became terribly disillusioned. While they were making money, it seemed to me they
were nothing but agents. They were making deals and collecting commissions. They were raising money and sometimes taking a piece of a company. They were doing the same thing we did at MCA when we were a talent agency. I thought to myself: I don’t have to go to Lehman Brothers to become an agent again.”

  Ultimately, Stein settled on philanthropy as a consuming avocation. He had begun to think seriously about it after his bout with prostate cancer in 1959, when he had taken “inventory of my life,” as he said. The next year, deciding to bring his life full circle, Stein had formed a foundation, Research to Prevent Blindness, which contributes funds to departments in ophthalmology at leading universities, and supports eye research in a variety of ways. He became a fervent promoter of his cause, and actually sought publicity. In a note to Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper in January 1964, with his bio attached, Stein wrote, “Did you know, Hedda, that Americans spend more money on Eye Wash than Eye Research?” (He also cautioned her, “Don’t get tripped up on the spelling of the word ‘ophthalmology.’ Note the ‘h’ after ‘p’—most people forget that extra ‘h’.”) And he became galvanized by the idea that rather than leaving the choice of philanthropies to executors of his estate, he would create and control them in his lifetime.

  In November 1966, the Jules Stein Eye Institute opened its doors at the University of California at Los Angeles. Its construction had cost about $5,550,000; Jules and Doris had contributed $1,250,000; Wasserman and other MCA associates and friends, $2,900,000, and the rest from the U.S. Public Health Service and the state of California. Stein had decided that this would be his monument; and, as he would later say, that “if I am to be remembered in the years to come, I truly believe my name will be associated more with ophthalmology and the preservation of sight than with the good fortune I have experienced in my business endeavors.” Once again, Stein and his wife, Doris, made the decisions about every aspect of the Eye Institute—a stately, soft pink marble building, far more akin to the White House than the Black Tower. They commissioned a study of what pictures patients like the best: Impressionists, it turned out. So all the rooms featured large, nicely framed reproductions of a Renoir, a Monet, a Degas—but nothing else (as in the MCA offices, pictures and personal mementos, like diplomas, were all expressly forbidden). No detail was too prosaic to rivet Stein. “Once I saw him studying a bunch of pictures of garbage cans. He was trying to decide which style, which color, was best for the Eye Institute,” recalled his stepson, Gerald Oppenheimer. “And another time, he was in the hospital at UCLA, and he looked out the window of his room and saw the rooftop of the Eye Institute, which had black pebbles on it. He said, ‘Get that stuff off there and put in the beige gravel!’ The next day, it was done.”

  UCLA was suitably grateful. The university presented Stein with an honorary doctorate in 1967, and Alfred Hitchcock was one of the speakers. “You stand before us as a prime example of the maxim that a man can overcome the disadvantages of a formal education—and go on to become a success,” Hitchcock began. “Of course, you started young. As I understand it, you went into the agency business immediately after receiving your medical degree. Most doctors I know fiddle around with a medical practice for years before they make good in real estate or the stock market. . . . So far as I know, though, you are the only medical man who ever made good in the movie business, with the possible exception of Vincent Edwards [the actor who starred in the TV medical series Ben Casey]. Anyway, I do think that your great contributions to this university are in the true spirit of forgiveness. After all, a college education delayed your marvelous career for eight long years. Congratulations.”

  Stein was now receiving a number of awards, and also honorary doctorates. He was pleased by these accolades. He was pleased even more by the notion, however extravagant, of what might someday be achieved through his continual funding after his death. “If it be true that blindness can be prevented—and if through my efforts we can preserve the sight of thousands, maybe millions of people—then I feel that my life has been well spent,” he declared. But there was a possible hitch to this grand ambition. Since the bulk of Stein’s wealth, which he intended to leave to the Eye Institute and Research to Prevent Blindness, was still in MCA stock, Stein’s ability to achieve his life’s ultimate goal depended to a great degree on the health of the company. And by the late sixties, that was very much in doubt.

  In a strict sense, Wasserman was new to the movie production business; but he had of course been immersed in it as an agent for more than twenty years before he entered production. Having watched others struggle, he had long since determined that he would not be hostage to the inevitable volatility of movie-making. A firm believer in diversification, he had started to follow Disney’s amusement park lead, with the Universal City Tour. He was determined to take advantage of the real estate potential of the four-hundred-acre Universal Studios property; he planned to build a five-hundred-room hotel, condominiums, office buildings, and also a giant entertainment center. MCA, having acquired Decca, was in the record business, too, as well as the music publishing business. It even owned a mail-order company, Spencer Gifts, and it had purchased a Colorado savings and loan. At this time, though, Wasserman’s greatest hedge against the financial swings of the movie business was MCA’s thriving and extraordinarily stable TV operation (thanks, especially, to the $200 million deal he had struck with Kintner).

  At first, it seemed that Wasserman’s talents—applied with such stunning effect in the agency and then TV production businesses—could be translated into the movie business. In January 1965, the Time magazine profile of Wasserman, “A New Kind of King”—the one Johnson had called to rib him about—heralded him as the savior of Hollywood. There was the usual hint of a dark side (“ ‘As long as I’ve known Lew,’ says his friend Tony Curtis, ‘everyone’s been frightened of him’ ”), but the two-page piece was mainly a paean. It pointed out that “in its short existence as a major producer, MCA has made an impressive number of profitable pictures”—citing Freud and To Kill a Mockingbird, among others. And it described Wasserman as “a corporate president in show business, a modified First National City banker who has wandered through an unusual door, and he has shaped MCA into a trimly efficient manufacturing corporation, ample in size, and self-sufficient. . . . Neither a sentimental showman nor a tightwad, [Wasserman] has shown that Hollywood can still make competent movies that are bids for quality within their own form and stay in the black, and that, as he puts it, ‘if you are going to manufacture anything, you ought to have the finest plant and facilities.’ But the heavy financial investments needed to create such an entity would be for naught without a special flair for sensing what is acceptable to the public—for that, ultimately, accounts for success in the entertainment world. This, Lew Wasserman has to a unique degree, and it has helped him bring Hollywood back from the margin of extinction.”

  The encomiums were premature. For by the late sixties, even MCA’s television business was not a sufficient hedge against the ongoing losses in movie production. In 1968, Universal Pictures lost close to $40 million, and MCA—which had always prided itself on its strong balance sheet—was about $90 million in debt. It turned out that MCA/Universal was not immune, after all, to a range of factors that were affecting the motion picture industry. The American economy was entering a recession. The movie-going audience was shrinking; in 1968, about 40 million Americans were going to the movies in an average week, compared with 70 million twenty years earlier. Television was competing for the public’s attention; so many studio heads decided they could win by offering theatergoers something they couldn’t get on TV—new blockbuster movies, often involving the highest-paid stars and thousands of extras on dazzling sets. Most of these extravaganzas failed. Twentieth Century-Fox spent more than $30 million on Cleopatra. Paramount invested about $20 million in Paint Your Wagon. Referring to a string of these movies as “the gaudy, 20-million-dollar elephants,” Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times in November 1969 that “the er
a of the Big Movie may be just about over.” And none too soon, Canby was saying. For these movies mainly served to highlight the gap between those executives who green-lighted them and the public who, in a time of social ferment and shifting values, wanted very different fare—smaller, more idiosyncratic, culturally attuned movies, like Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, I Am Curious (Yellow), and The Graduate.

  Universal had not binged on $20 million movies, but neither was it producing these smaller, more evocative films. Even in MCA’s thriving television business, creativity had never been its strong suit. And now that the long-derided “sausage factory” was in the movie business, its formulaic approach was even more untenable; many writers, actors, and directors viewed Universal as a place where top management exercised far too much control over the film-making process, and efficiency was the mantra. And, of course, the bar in movie-making was set so much higher than in television; the costs were far greater, and so was the risk of failure; there really were no formulas, as Wasserman was learning.

  In 1967, Universal was pinning its hopes on the upcoming release of Thoroughly Modern Millie, starring Julie Andrews; its annual report said that the movie promised to be “the most successful in our history.” There was some reason for optimism. Two years earlier, Andrews had starred in The Sound of Music, which was one of the highest-grossing films ever made, and triggered a frenzy of attempts to replicate the elements of its success. And the producer of Thoroughly Modern Millie was Ross Hunter, who had Pillow Talk, Magnificent Obsession, and other commercially successful movies to his credit. In the event, though, Thoroughly Modern Millie was an expensive, banal, failed spoof (described by Pauline Kael as “desperately with-it”), which produced middling results at the box office. The next movie to arouse great hope at Universal was Isadora, starring Vanessa Redgrave, about the free-spirited dancer Isadora Duncan—a character to whom sixties’ audiences would relate, Universal executives thought. “We hadn’t had a good movie for a long time,” said Don Winn, an MCA executive who worked closely with Wasserman in this period. “Isadora was filmed entirely in Europe, and Lew went to Europe to see the rushes. The film was about halfway then. He said it was spectacular. He told the producers, ‘This film is about a woman running around doing interesting things. Whatever you do, don’t let it go over ninety minutes.’ We kept waiting for the release prints—it was to be a Christmas movie. It was December, and we were still waiting! The prints came in to New York two days before the preview, which was unheard of.” Wasserman, Winn, and a couple of other MCA executives watched the movie in the New York office’s screening room. “It went on and on and on and on. It was close to three hours! I fell asleep several times. Wasserman was so angry he was speechless. It was the maddest I’ve ever seen him.” Redgrave was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actress, but Isadora was not the hit MCA had been waiting for. It was Wasserman’s longtime protégé, Jay Kanter, who was the head of European production for Universal Pictures, and who was responsible not only for Isadora, but other costly box office failures, including A Countess from Hong Kong, with Sophia Loren and Marlon Brando, directed by Charlie Chaplin.