When Hollywood Had a King

by Connie Bruck

  In his interview, Schreiber gave a bare-bones, if not misleading, account of his role vis-à-vis the Nixon White House. The days of trumpeting “the Schreiber Plan” were clearly over. He mentioned the meeting at San Clemente, saying that “the industry representatives discussed what they viewed as unfair treatment by the government and an investment tax credit issue involving the Disney Corporation.” On occasion after that meeting, Schreiber said, he “had talked to Mr. Flanigan and to James Loken of Mr. Flanigan’s staff. . . . Schreiber said he was involved in the San Clemente meeting because of his friendship with the President and indeed had recommended to the President that he not have the meeting because he would only get complaints.” Interestingly, Schreiber did manage to drop Wasserman’s name twice, as someone who was involved in lobbying for the motion picture industry’s interests.

  Regarding his own fund-raising efforts, Schreiber said he “volunteered to assist in fund raising activities in a conversation he had with John Mitchell in mid-1971.” He did so, he said, because he is “a friend of President Nixon and wanted to help him.” He said he became active in fund-raising with Herbert Kalmbach, whom he knew from previous campaigns; he acknowledged having met with him in New York and Washington “a few times” in connection with fund-raising efforts for the 1972 campaign. He also acknowledged his role in soliciting the contributions from Hirshhorn and from Ashley.

  Finally, Schreiber said that “on occasions” he had talked to Mitchell about the private antitrust suit the studios had brought against the networks. He made no mention now of his having lobbied for the government antitrust suit—of Nixon’s having promised him the government would do something about it, of his meeting with Associate Attorney General for Antitrust Richard McLaren about it, of his having told Loken that it was the government’s suit against the networks that was what was really needed, or of his allegedly having called Ehrlichman shortly before it was filed. When Mitchell was interviewed by a lawyer from the special prosecutor’s team several months later, his story on the suit squared with Schreiber’s. “While he may have once discussed the private suit against the networks with Schreiber, he believes this was far into 1972,” the government lawyer wrote in his memorandum. And on the fund-raising, Mitchell went even further in distancing Schreiber from himself than Schreiber had. “Mitchell never discussed Schreiber’s efforts to raise contributions for the President with him,” the lawyer wrote.

  Ashley’s contribution had excited some investigative interest—because of its size, and its timing, and his being an unlikely donor. That interest sharpened in November 1973, when special prosecutor Leon Jaworski received a letter from an individual, unnamed, who claimed to be an employee of Warner Communications, urging him to investigate Ashley’s contribution. “$137,000 changed hands just prior to April 7, 1972—purportedly from Ashley as an individual. A full-fledged examination will indicate that this money was actually from the Warner Communications Corporation in exchange for special consideration of the motion picture industry’s interests.” It was not an unlikely proposition. Political contributions out of corporate funds were prohibited; but there were so many corporate contributions masquerading as personal in the Nixon 1972 campaign that it was almost the order of the day. Among them was a $150,000 contribution, solicited by Kalmbach, from Thomas V. Jones, chairman of the Northrop Corporation. Jones, who was a member of the MCA board, made the contributions in his name with corporate funds; the corporation was fined. Many of the corporations that made these illegal contributions were in industries dependent on government regulation—like the defense industry, the airlines, and oil companies. In the past, the motion picture industry would not have fit the pattern; but in the Nixon administration it did.

  The dairy industry makes a suggestive, albeit hypothetical, analogue to the motion picture industry in their respective dealings with the Nixon administration. The milk producers were focused on milk price supports; and in return for a favorable decision by Nixon, they were willing to pledge $2 million for the 1972 campaign. The Nixon White House strategy was to tell them that a favorable decision would be made, but to delay any announcement until the money commitments were firm. The White House, furthermore, wanted to disguise the contributions, for fear of their appearing to be a quid pro quo. The milk producers believed they were obligated to report their contributions, J. Anthony Lukas wrote, “but in a series of meetings, Kalmbach recalls, ‘We were trying to develop a procedure . . . where they could meet their independent reporting requirements and still not result in disclosure.’ ” This became the procedure: the dairy industry gave its money in small amounts to a network of committees in the District of Columbia, which then passed the money to the campaign; and the committees were given names like Organization of Sensible Citizens, Committee for Political Integrity, Americans United for Objective Reporting, and so forth. Interestingly, when Ashley made his contributions, he made them through Kalmbach’s partner, Frank DeMarco, as his agent, and he made them in small amounts, to thirty-one committees, with names like Effective Government Committee, Improved Government Committee, Good Government Committee, Better Society Council, Improved Society Council, Improved Society Support Group, and so forth. Jack Warner made his $100,000 contribution in a similar way. (When the government lawyers sought to question the eighty-two-year-old Warner in 1974, his doctor said that he was not “mentally or physically capable of being interviewed.”)

  Ashley was questioned, with two highly regarded lawyers in attendance. He was not charged with any crime, and over the years he has stuck to the story he gave that day in August 1974: that he made that large contribution not for the industry but for himself, with personal funds, because he wanted to raise his profile in the political world (and perhaps receive an ambassadorship, he later said); and he did it in that odd form because Schreiber had dropped by his house with Kalmbach, who told him that his partner, DeMarco, would handle the transaction; and DeMarco advised him to do it the way he did. This much is certainly true; if Ashley had wanted to be an ambassador, it would have been wise to contribute at that level. Ambassadorships, like much else in the Nixon White House, were for sale, and with a high price tag. One of the charges for which Kalmbach would serve time in prison was having promised federal employment in return for supporting a candidate—specifically, a pledge of $100,000 for an ambassadorship. Alexander Butterfield said that Tex Thornton, the chairman of Litton Industries (which had, coincidentally, bought Jules Stein’s beloved MCA building in Beverly Hills to use as its corporate headquarters), called him one day to ask him to make a discreet inquiry for him. Thornton said he believed he was being considered for the post of U.S. ambassador to Japan, and he wanted to know if he were likely to be chosen. Butterfield promptly called Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s devoted secretary, and put the question to her. “ ‘Let’s see,’ she said, going to her lists. Then—‘He gave a goddam fifty thousand!’ She said it with such vitriol. I called Tex, and said, ‘Looks like they’re not happy, you only gave $50,000.’ He said that wasn’t true, that he’d actually given $89,000. Anyway,” Butterfield concluded, “he didn’t get it.”

  Viewed against the backdrop of the Nixon White House, the favors done for the motion picture industry seem unlikely to have been dispensed without some substantial consideration, even beyond the handful of large contributions from Schreiber, Stein, Warner, and Ashley. Hollywood had celebrities’ support to barter, but, mainly, it had money; that was the cardinal lure for politicians. And Nixon was too ambivalent about Hollywood—and too focused on money—not to have expected to be compensated on a grand scale. As Arthur Krim commented in his oral history, “There was a kind of standing joke between President Johnson and myself because there were occasions where I would have boasted of a $10,000 contribution from somebody who subsequently gave Nixon $750,000. We were living with a different level. The president considered $10,000 a substantial contribution; Nixon thought of it as a cup of coffee.”

  But the government lawyers who were lookin
g for evidence of a quid pro quo here were reminiscent of those who had tried to build a criminal antitrust case against MCA. That had been an intensive, high-priority investigation, which continued for years, and yet those lawyers had been badly outmaneuvered. This, on the other hand, was merely one of many Watergate-related investigations, and it seems to have been handled in a desultory, superficial manner. By February 1974, less than a year after the investigation had begun, attorney Hamilton Fox III had already reached firm conclusions. As he wrote in a memo, he was “satisfied that the antitrust suit is completely legitimate.” His conviction derived mainly from interviewing the Justice Department lawyers involved in the case. Fox did think that the delay in filing might seem suspicious. However, “the explanation that has been given me for this—and I know nothing to contradict it—is that there was initially an argument within the Division over the proposed remedy in the suit.” This took months to resolve, he continued, and then Mitchell asked that the suit not be filed until Herb Klein spoke to the networks’ presidents; Klein delayed, and several more months went by. Fox acknowledged that Mitchell met with the movie people on several occasions during this period. “It is possible, I suppose, that Mitchell deliberately delayed the suit so that he could hold it over movie executives until they contributed. . . . But there is absolutely no evidence that Mitchell did this. I have not spoken with the major contributors from the movie industry, but I have considerable doubts that any of them are going to tell me, even if it occurred, that they made their contributions in return for Mitchell’s promise to sue the networks.”

  Indeed. The investigation was eventually closed, and no charges brought.

  The last word, really, on this episode in the MCA-Washington chronicle came, fittingly enough, from Jules Stein. His daughter Jean was visiting Los Angeles in early August 1974. Her politics were still diametrically opposed to her father’s; Jules had been particularly infuriated when she’d held an event to raise money for the legal defense of Daniel Ellsberg, the former national security official who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. Now, Jean was hosting a big party, held within a day or so of Nixon’s resignation on August 9. Tom Wicker of the New York Times, who had written many columns about Nixon and Watergate, was among the guests that night. So was Jules Stein—and Wicker thought that Jules might attempt to defend Nixon. Many of the guests were seated outdoors, on a big, unlit side porch, as dusk gathered and dinner was about to be served. “Watergate, of course, was very much a topic of discussion,” Wicker recalled. “Suddenly, I heard Jules’s voice rising above the din, out of the dark. He said, ‘What I want to know is, how can I get my money back?’ ”

  It had been quite an initiation into national politics for Schreiber. He had enjoyed access to the White House on a scale unprecedented in Hollywood, and he had been able to win nearly everything he’d wanted for his industry, and his much prized MCA. He’d been so overshadowed by Wasserman in Hollywood for decades; but now, on the political scene during the Nixon years, Schreiber had been the power broker. He had not been close to Nixon personally; but he had been to those around the president who got things done. Eventually, though, nearly all those people—Mitchell, Kalmbach, Haldeman, Ehrlichman—went to jail. And the president for whom he had expressed such full-hearted admiration resigned in disgrace.

  Schreiber remained active in Republican politics. Knowing Reagan as well as he did, he had written a memo to Garment back in 1970, in which he said, “I can frankly state that somewhere in the mind of our Governor lurks the hope that if our President falters in the next few years he could be the savior of the party.” Well, Nixon had certainly faltered, and Reagan was seeking the presidential nomination in 1976. Despite his long relationship with Reagan, Schreiber was unequivocally for President Gerald Ford. He was, in fact, national co-chairman of the President Ford Committee, a fund-raising group to support Ford’s reelection bid. Garment recalled a lunch he had with Schreiber in late May 1976 at Schreiber’s apartment at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York. “I remember, there was a Monet, a Pisarro, a Boudin—gorgeous, small paintings,” Garment enthused. “Taft was certain that Ford should be nominated, that Reagan was not equipped. He said, ‘This is very confidential. Ronnie is a wonderful guy. But Ford is entitled to be president. And it should be known that Mrs. Reagan gets her guidance from a fortune-teller. You can quietly let that out.’ ”

  A few days later, Schreiber, sixty-eight, entered UCLA Medical Center for what was expected to be routine prostate surgery. During the operation, he was given a transfusion of incompatible blood—mislabeled by a hospital technician—and he died ten days later. In the last decade of his life, he had really come to prominence in the political arena; so it was not surprising that articles, following his death, focused on his political activities. While there was no mention of his closeness to Nixon’s inner circle, there was the faintest suggestion of controversy. Los Angeles Times reporter Richard West wrote that Schreiber had been Reagan’s agent since 1938, and had supported him in his political campaigns, too, but had recently defected to Ford; that he had supported candidates as diverse as the liberal Democrat Tom Bradley for mayor of Los Angeles, and the right-wing Republican candidate Max Rafferty for the U.S. Senate; and that he had served as a trustee of the Nixon Foundation. It was enough to rouse the ire of Schreiber’s friends. Robert Finch wrote a letter to the editor of the Times. “I was more than a little distressed to see the totally inappropriate coverage and distorted characterization” of Schreiber, Finch wrote. “Instead of reciting his institutional commitments advancing the arts, health care, his church and countless eleemosynary endeavors, you inaccurately paraded a list of controversial political figures with whom he had been associated.” Jules Stein, in a letter to Times chairman Franklin Murphy, referred to Finch’s letter, saying it “affected me deeply,” and added that he, too, was disturbed by the coverage. “You, yourself, were very close to Taft as head of the Los Angeles Times and I thought you would instruct your people to do a momentous obituary on my associate of fifty years.” Stein referred to Schreiber at one point as “our beloved Taft.”

  It was an unusually emotional communication from the taciturn, hemmed-in Stein, and it hinted at the dramatic contrast in his relationship with Schreiber, whom he had passed over, and with Wasserman, whom he’d chosen—twice, in effect. For a corporate triangle, this one had been extraordinarily bitter and long-lived. Wasserman would have ousted Schreiber after Schreiber’s attempted coup, but because of Stein, he could not; his hands were tied. Now, Wasserman was rid of his mortal antagonist—and Stein was bereft. “I have lost my oldest friend,” Stein said at Schreiber’s funeral.

  Alfred Hitchcock and Lew Wasserman at the Academy Awards ceremony in 1974, as Wasserman received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

  Chapter 4

  DOMINION

  The seventies belonged to Wasserman. It was the time he had been preparing for all his life, when all his striving and positioning came to fruition in a sweetly satisfying apotheosis. He was Hollywood’s leader, the company he had shaped was thriving, and there was no longer any caveat to his dominion there. On June 5, 1973, the seventy-seven-year-old Stein resigned as chairman of the board, and Wasserman, sixty, ascended to that post, while continuing to hold the title of chief executive officer (a signal that his chairmanship would be more activist than Stein’s had been). This changing of the guard took place at the annual stockholders’ meeting, still held in Chicago by decades-old custom. Sidney Sheinberg, the blunt, belligerent Texan who had joined MCA as a lawyer in 1959 and eventually become president of Universal Television, succeeded Wasserman as president—the title Wasserman had won as a young man and held on to for nearly thirty years. (As Sheinberg had prepared to travel to the board meeting in Chicago, a friend at the company who had long speculated with Sheinberg about the origins of MCA remarked, “Now you’ll get to meet the real board of directors.”) Sheinberg had never been a Stein
favorite. “Would Jules have chosen Sid?” Wasserman asked, echoing the question. He considered. “Probably not. Sid was a little too tough and too brusque for Jules.” But—for the first time—it did not matter.

  Wasserman had long cultivated the image of someone who was inaccessible to the press, but in truth he was more press-savvy than press-shy; he had, after all, been a publicist for a Cleveland nightclub when he attracted the attention of Stein’s brother, Bill. And for years, he had used the press, sparingly but deftly, meting out an interview to a favored reporter in order to publicize some message that was important for his business. Now, though—as regent—Wasserman decided it was time to step into the spotlight. He cooperated with profiles in the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times Calendar and even (with his wife, Edie) in the Los Angeles Times Home Magazine—all to great effect. The only one to breathe a hint of a negative was the page-one story in the Wall Street Journal on July 10, 1973. Reporter Earl Gottschalk wrote that some referred to MCA headquarters as the “tower of fear,” and that MCA’s dedication to computers and tight cost controls had led many writers to complain that its TV programs suffered from a bottom-line preoccupation, calling MCA “the factory.” “A testament to the company’s power,” Gottschalk added, “is that no writer is willing to go on the record with specific charges about the company.” These negatives, however, appeared almost incidental in a portrait of such dazzling corporate success. For Gottschalk pointed out that while the history of the entertainment industry was characterized by periodic weakness, MCA had remained strong and durable over many decades. Currently, it was the nation’s leading supplier of television programs for the networks and operated the world’s largest motion picture studio. It also had interests in records, music publishing, real estate, recreation, mail order gifts, and savings and loans. It had created a studio tour that was the third most popular tourist attraction in Southern California. And MCA earned a record profit in 1972 ($20.8 million on revenues of $346 million), with another record expected for 1973. MCA had achieved all this success by taking risks, Gottschalk emphasized. When the movie studios were recoiling from television, MCA had embraced it; when movie companies were trying to sell studio real estate to cut costs, MCA had bought the 440-acre Universal Studios. And now, Wasserman hoped to bring his success with television to a new level—revolutionizing the medium with MCA’s Disco-Vision, a machine, still in development, that would allow movies and other material to be shown on home TV sets (the chance to sell, for yet another vehicle, the thousands of movies and TV shows MCA owned). Finally, Gottschalk wrote that while some described Wasserman as hard and intimidating, he saw no evidence of those traits. “Indeed, when he’s having a drink with a visitor and showing him his Beverly Hills home (complete with a projection room), he is a gracious host with a lively wit and an easy smile.”