by Connie Bruck
Lew Wasserman and Edgar Bronfman, Jr., in 1996. Ron Galella/Gamma Presse
It may well be that the more difficult Bronfman found his job (and the worse his reviews became), the more compelled he was to belittle his predecessors; it was their fault, he was saying, that he could find no quick fix to the company’s problems. But his wholesale indictment, while it had elements of truth, was insupportable. It was simply not so, for example, that MCA was a “truly broken company” when it had come into Bronfman’s hands. It had solid core assets—in music, in movie and television production, in recreation, in publishing—which needed to be galvanized. It had been churning out steady, if somewhat flat, earnings through the early nineties, and in 1995, the year of the Seagram acquisition, the music and recreation divisions were especially strong. In fact, television was the only Universal division that was losing money and probably deserved to be called “broken”—yet another painful irony for Wasserman, in a season full of them. Bronfman had tried to bring Universal TV into the comedy business by making a deal with Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, the TV production company; but he had paid $75 million for something that by many estimates was worth only a fraction of that—and that seemed unlikely to resuscitate the TV business in any event. So in October 1997, about two and a half years after taking over the company, Bronfman decided to make a bold move. It had become his pattern: faced with a crisis or a challenge, he would reach for a high-profile (if dubious) deal as a remedy. Now—tired of trying to find a cure for this ailing TV business, which he didn’t like anyway—he sold it.
It was a startling and unprecedented transaction: Universal sold most of its cable and domestic television assets, including the USA cable network, a pay TV programming service, to Barry Diller’s HSN, Inc., which would be renamed USA Networks. The deal did give Universal a stake in the company—and the possibility of regaining control of its assets in the future, though Diller said, at the time, that that day might be thirty years away. Diller, meanwhile, won a remarkable prize—USA had one of the five biggest cable network subscriber bases in the country. One entertainment executive said, “This is a great deal for Barry. How could he have got access to 73 million homes? It could have taken him the rest of his career.” Bronfman admired Diller intensely; Diller had been his friend and mentor since the two first met in the mid-seventies, when Diller was an executive at Paramount and Bronfman was a twenty-year-old youth, looking for a toehold in Hollywood. So it was not surprising, in a way, that Bronfman would decide to bet on Diller to make more of the business than he could have himself. Still, it seemed so inescapably lopsided—as though Bronfman had amputated a limb, while Diller had vastly extended his reach. It was plain, though, that Bronfman did not see it that way, and that he had expected accolades for the deal he and Diller had cooked up together. As Bronfman said, “It breaks the paradigm, it’s out of the box, it’s innovative, no one’s ever done it before.”
In Hollywood, however, there was a popular view that the reason no one had ever done it before was not an earlier lack of ingenuity. Universal was now the only major studio with almost no domestic television operation of its own. One studio head commented, “It is not pure happenstance that all majors are in both the motion picture and the TV production businesses. There is a reason. It has evolved over the past fifty years. After all, TV and motion pictures are similar creative processes at heart, and the distribution is intermeshed.” Perhaps Bronfman’s worst sin in the eyes of Hollywood, though, was that he had been taken in a deal (just how badly taken would be illustrated three years later, when Diller’s USA would essentially get $11.7 billion of value in return for assets it bought for $4.1 billion). And it was not the first time Bronfman had been bested since he took over MCA from the man who, according to legend, never was. Indeed, while Hollywood denizens chortled at Edgar Jr.’s combination of arrogance and pratfalls, the more sober question they asked one another was whether Wasserman had really miscalculated and lost control, as it seemed, or whether he had executed some grand, quintessentially inscrutable design, in what was actually his deal of all deals. In a piece in the Los Angeles Times Magazine in May 1995, after the Seagram acquisition, Frank Rose reviewed what had happened since Wasserman had decided to make the Matsushita deal, and asked: “Would Wasserman really make a deal to sell the company and come away with less than he wanted?” For the answer, Rose quoted “an old Hollywood hand” who told him, “Put your money on Wasserman. Not Sheinberg, Wasserman. Wasserman is brilliant. And he never loses.”
The Wasserman mystique died hard. The defining characteristics of the persona he had created were that he never lost in a deal, never made a mistake, could see around corners into tomorrow, and that his reach, from the underworld to the White House, gave him a matchless control. But Wasserman lived so long that he outlasted his myth. It was hard to see in the Wasserman of the Seagram era the monumental, intimidating figure he had been. Shorn of his corporate power, deprived of the work that had consumed him and lent meaning to his life, his long stride painfully hobbled by age’s infirmities, Wasserman seemed remarkably life-size—eager for company, nostalgic, vulnerable.
While the company he had built was being overhauled and dismembered, Wasserman stuck stubbornly to his routine: leaving the house for Universal every day at 8:15, working on the approximately $2 billion in trusts that he was managing (including five Jules Stein trusts), generally eating lunch at his table in the commissary. He eschewed the extensive redecoration being done in the rest of the building; his corner office, alone, was still furnished with Stein’s antiques—even Stein’s desk, which Doris Stein had offered to Wasserman after Jules died. Sometimes he would complain wryly to visitors about the fact that even though he had a contract as a consultant, his advice was never sought; or about the silliness of building a bathroom for every executive office; or the pettiness of removing “MCA” from the elevator floor plate. Some friends felt it was unseemly for Wasserman to remain while his world was taken apart, piece by piece, all around him. Sheinberg had started an independent production company, financed by a generous deal from Seagram (facilitated by Spielberg). He had brought his two sons into the company, and taken office space in a building in Beverly Hills. He tried to persuade Wasserman to join him there. Sheinberg argued that Wasserman, by remaining at Universal—and not publicly criticizing the Bronfman regime—was lending legitimacy to the damage that was being done to the company, and was letting his former employees down. (Sheinberg, for his part, was characteristically unrestrained, referring to Bronfman’s firing of MCA executives as “ethnic cleansing.”) Wasserman bought a building in Beverly Hills for his grandson Casey, and he acknowledged that he could, obviously, have his office there. But the truth, evidently, was that he had to be here. “They named the building for me, how can I leave?” he said with a slight smile.
His secretary of many years, Melody Sherwood, now found him far more approachable. He would often regale her with the stories he’d long loved to tell, but which she had never before heard firsthand. One of his stories bore an uncanny similarity to the one Jules Stein had recounted: of his having been summoned to Bette Davis’s home, finding her in bed, being certain it was an invitation, but, as Stein put it, leaving the way he came. Except that in Wasserman’s version, it was he who was summoned to Joan Crawford’s home, and found her in bed—but had not responded to her implicit invitation. Since Sherwood had not known the story Stein had told many years earlier, she had no reason to wonder about the veracity of Wasserman’s at the time. Sherwood loved his stories, which he told and retold; and she was so emboldened by his talkativeness that she tried to draw him out in less programmed ways. Since she had started working for him, she had been curious about what lay beneath the implacable facade. “In my conversations with him, I was always trying to find out how he felt,” Sherwood said. “One day, I said to him, ‘Everyone in the industry wants to be you. Who would you want to be?’ And, without a moment’s hesitation, he said, ‘Clark Gable.’ ”
> She was momentarily speechless. It was hardly what one might have anticipated—that Wasserman, in his private fantasy, was as starstruck as the masses of fans, and wished he could have been the devastatingly handsome, dashing Gable? “Then,” Sherwood continued, “I said, ‘If you weren’t married’ (because I knew he would only approach it that way), ‘what star would you have wanted?’ And, again without a moment’s hesitation, he said, ‘Bette Davis.’ I thought, well, she was a very strong, opinionated woman, just like Mrs. W.”—that is, Edie Wasserman. “I thought he really was crazy about Mrs. W., and I told her later that I took what he said about Bette Davis as a great compliment to her.”
Wasserman had time now for the preoccupations of ordinary life—family, in particular. Friends had long disagreed about what happiness Wasserman derived from his marriage. Certainly, the marriage had endured. In a Vanity Fair piece in 1996, writer Dominick Dunne wrote that they were “unmistakably a couple, and a devoted one at that, although in her amazingly forthright way [Edie] said to me, ‘There were some bad times between the 10th and 20th years. He never stopped working, and I felt neglected, but we weathered it.” (Edie Wasserman did not respond to a request for an interview for this book.) There was no debate, though, about how much Wasserman’s relationship with his grandson added to his life. It had been a delayed gratification. In 1970, the Wassermans’ daughter, Lynne, had made a second marriage, to a stockbroker named Jack Meyrowitz (he subsequently changed his name to Myers), of whom her parents severely disapproved. Lynne had had a daughter, Carol, with her first husband, Ron Lief, and now, a son, Casey, with Myers. Lynne, who has told friends that her childhood was exceedingly difficult, broke off relations with her parents in the seventies. According to Ned Tanen, who worked closely with Wasserman for many years, Lynne would not allow Edie to see the children but she did occasionally drop her little girl off at a friend’s house where Lew stopped to see her on his way home from work. It was during this period that Wasserman commented, in a New West magazine story in 1978, that “I was unfortunate not to have a son, only a daughter.”
In the early eighties, though, Lynne separated from Myers, and the estrangement from her parents began to ease. Wasserman soon became a doting grandfather—fixated, in particular, on his grandson, Casey, who was then about eight years old. The two became regulars, every weekend, at Nate ’n Al’s, Beverly Hills’s landmark delicatessen; when Casey became a teenager, Wasserman would rearrange his schedule to attend Casey’s after-school tennis matches. It was just the stuff of family life—but it caused great comment among those who knew Wasserman, because he had not lent himself to such pastimes before. Some who listened to the habitually spare Wasserman rhapsodizing about Casey over the years have wondered about such concentration on the male grandchild. What seemed plain, in any event, was that Wasserman counted himself unfortunate no longer, because he’d finally gotten a son. When Casey turned twenty-one in 1995, he changed his name to Wasserman. In a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, Casey described his name change as a rejection of his father, who had been convicted in a money-laundering deal, and with whom he had long had a poor relationship—and an acknowledgment of his “real” family. Wasserman made Casey, at twenty-one, president of the family’s charitable foundation—which contributes primarily to education, health and welfare, and Jewish culture.
He devoted more time to his philanthropy, too. Wasserman had established a scholarship fund at the California Institute of Technology in the seventies; since then, he had continued to fund hundreds of scholarships at various colleges, including Brandeis University, New York University, and the University of California at Los Angeles. (“All because I couldn’t get a scholarship to college,” Wasserman said.) He and Edie gave large amounts to the $40 million Edie and Lew Wasserman Eye Research Center building, which will be the third building in the complex of the Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA. (The second building was named for Doris Stein; at its dedication ceremony, one Stein family friend remarked, “They’re making Doris sound like Madame Curie!”) For many years, Jules Stein and Wasserman had contributed to the Motion Picture & Television Fund, which supports the Country House, a retirement place in Woodland Hills for people who have worked in the film and television industry. Wasserman would often describe how Jules walked into his office one day, quite upset, and said he’d been out to the home and found the grounds in terrible condition. “Jules said, ‘I’ve taken care of it. I’m giving them a million dollars; you’ll give them a million—and we’ll put it in trust for the maintenance of the grounds.’ A couple years went by. We were trying to build a hospital out there, and money was tight. Finally, I walked into his office, and said, ‘I’ve solved the problem. You’re going to give $1.5 million, I’m going to give $1.5 million, and we’ll build a hospital.’ ” When Edie Wasserman paid a visit to the home in 1978, she later told Variety reporter Army Archerd, “I flipped over the place.” She joined its board, and raising money for it became her consuming avocation. She worked at that fund-raising, Wasserman once said, as though it meant life or death to her. Each year, she had her birthday dinner there; Wasserman said he had established a fund so that a dinner would be held in her honor at the home, on November 4, in perpetuity. Friends said that he deplored the fact that in recent years the major studios were less generous in their contributions to the fund for the home—shirking their obligation, in his view. “We all got rich off these people!” he would say, with some heat. And it was not only the Motion Picture & Television Fund that was suffering from a relative paucity in giving by contemporary Hollywood. The Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles’s new performing arts center, also had trouble tapping Hollywood support in the post-Wasserman era. When Wasserman ruled this world—and mobilized its charitable giving—he was deeply rooted in the Los Angeles community; his successors, heads of the media entertainment behemoths—Sumner Redstone, Rupert Murdoch, Gerald Levin—were not.
Wasserman was ecumenical in his donations. Historically, the motion picture industry leaders had cultivated good relations with the Catholic Church. It was useful to have the church on their side, and it generally was. After the CSU was crushed, when Father Dunne was in great disfavor with the Hollywood producers, his superiors had, of course, obligingly transferred him to Arizona—and Louis B. Mayer had been an honorary pallbearer at Archbishop Cantwell’s funeral. So it was not surprising that Wasserman, like his predecessors, would establish close relations with the archdiocese. When Pope John Paul II visited Los Angeles in 1987, Wasserman had hosted him at the Universal Amphitheater, where he had introduced him to a crowd of thousands. He contributed generously in the nineties to the construction of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, in downtown Los Angeles. A good friend of Cardinal Roger Mahony’s, Wasserman was the only non-Catholic recipient of the Cardinal’s Award, an honor bestowed on those who are outstanding for their good works.
His relationship with Jewish charities—and the Jewish community generally—had been more complicated. Wasserman certainly had never tried to disown his Jewishness—the Steins’ high-society aspirations were not his—but he resisted the conventions (the tyranny, he seemed to feel) of organized Jewish life. He had, of course, declined to join Hillcrest—the club that had been founded by Jews, for Jews, in the early twenties, in reaction to the policies of other country clubs in Los Angeles barring Jews. One might question exactly when, in Wasserman’s twenty-hour days of devout purposefulness, he would have found time to go to the club. But the reason he gave for his refusal to join, in any event, was that it was restricted to Jews. He had persistently refused the demands of many Jewish charities, though he said he had contributed to Israel even before its founding. He had had his run-ins with the American Jewish Committee, and the Jewish Federation Council. Now, though, Wasserman had softened toward the Jewish bureaucratic world. He gave many millions to Jewish causes such as the United Jewish Fund, the World Jewish Congress—and, yes, the American Jewish Committee. He was a major supporter of Steven
Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, and of Charles Bronfman’s Birthright Israel initiative. He also gave $1 million toward the creation of the Yitzhak Rabin Hillel Center for Jewish Life at UCLA. (This was not surprising; Wasserman had been a strong supporter of Rabin’s, and of the Oslo peace accords.) The UCLA Hillel director, Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, would later comment that Wasserman “was not an intensely involved Jew,” but that his contributions to various Jewish causes represented a renewed commitment to this community late in life. And Wasserman even joined Hillcrest! He emphasized that he had done so only because his grandson, Casey, wanted to join and could not satisfy Hillcrest’s charitable-giving requirement on his own (contributions were made through the Wasserman family foundation). Wasserman enjoyed recounting how when he had received Hillcrest’s voluminous application (and financial disclosure) forms, he had written “Nuts!” across the top, and returned them. He was promptly invited to join.
Some who had been excommunicated from Wasserman’s world for years found they were now welcome. Ned Tanen had told Wasserman he wanted to leave MCA in 1982, but Wasserman would not let him out of his contract; in 1984, he went to work for Paramount. He knew that by leaving he was committing the cardinal sin—but he may have thought that Wasserman would make an exception in his case, since they had a reasonably close, if tempestuous, relationship, and Wasserman had always given him a leeway he did not allow most others. Tanen recalled that when he had been badly injured in a motorcycle accident, confined to bed for weeks, “these people were there for me. Lew and Edie came to see me every day. Lew said, ‘If you ever get on a motorcycle again, I will cancel your goddamn insurance!’ Now, I don’t know if that was showing affection—but that was Lew.” Once Tanen left, however, “the curtain came down.” He realized that he was to be no exception. “The minute you leave Lew Wasserman, it’s revisionist history. It’s not that you died. It’s that you were never there. If he didn’t need you, you didn’t exist.” What shook him the most, however, was that when his ex-wife (who was the mother of his children, and someone the Wassermans had known well) committed suicide, he never heard from Lew or Edie—no call, no note. After that, he considered the rupture final.